Companies Hiring Forward Deployed Engineers in 2026

Who is hiring, and how concentrated it is

The census counted 292 open FDE-family roles across 11 companies. By company, the open roles were Palantir 95, Databricks 85, OpenAI 70, Cohere 13, Scale AI 13, Sierra 4, Writer 4, Modal 4, Baseten 2, Ramp 1, and Sardine 1. The shape of that list matters as much as the total.

Three companies (Palantir, Databricks, and OpenAI) account for 250 of the 292 roles, or the large majority of everything open. That concentration cuts both ways for a job seeker. The big three are where the volume is, so they are the most reliable places to find postings, but the long tail of smaller companies (Cohere, Scale AI, Sierra, Writer, Modal, Baseten, Ramp, and Sardine) is where you find less crowded applicant pools and often a broader remit per hire.

Where the roles are and what they are called

Two practical details decide whether your search actually surfaces these jobs: geography and job title. Both are worth setting up deliberately before you start applying.

Geography and remote availability

About 48 percent of the roles are US-based, and roughly 29 percent are remote-friendly, so a little over half sit outside the US and a meaningful minority can be done from anywhere the company supports. Beyond the US there is strong demand in the UK, Australia, Japan, and South Korea, which makes this one of the more internationally distributed engineering roles you can target.

The title problem

The same underlying job is advertised under several titles, which is why many qualified people miss most of the market. In this census the counts were Forward Deployed Engineer 152, Forward Deployed Software Engineer 58, AI or Deployment Engineer 43, and Deployment Strategist 36. If you only search for one of these, you are seeing a fraction of what is open, so search all of them and save each as a separate alert.

How to run the search

Put the two points together: query every title variant across each company's own careers page, and filter by the locations that fit you rather than assuming the role is US-only. Because postings turn over quickly, checking the big three boards directly on a regular cadence tends to beat relying on aggregators that lag behind the source. The full report keeps the underlying counts in one place if you want a starting map.

What the roles pay

Pay disclosure is partial, so read these figures carefully. Across the 40 roles that published US compensation bands, median total compensation ran roughly 197,000 to 294,000 dollars, reaching up to about 390,000 dollars plus equity at the top of the range. Those numbers come only from roles that disclosed, which skews toward US postings, so treat them as a guide rather than a guarantee for any specific title or location.

The practical takeaway is that FDE work is well compensated across a wide band, and the spread reflects real differences in seniority, location, and company. If you are preparing to compete for these roles, Rung helps you get ready the way the interviews actually test you: in-browser coding against real test suites, live SQL practice, applied-AI scenario drills that mirror the case and decomp rounds these teams use, and an AI mock interviewer for pressure reps. For the complete company-by-company breakdown behind the figures above, see the full report at /reports/forward-deployed-engineer-jobs.