# FDE hiring this week: open roles fell by 9 once newly tracked boards are set aside > The count reached 440 on 9 October 2026, but 131 of those roles came from 35 newly tracked careers boards, while 12 roles closed and 3 new ones appeared. Original: https://fdetimes.net/en/analysis/fde-hiring-report-2026-10-10/ **This edition is the baseline.** FDE Times began tracking FDE hiring on 7 October 2026, so there is no earlier period to compare with yet. It describes where things stand and what changed within the period; week-on-week or month-on-month trends will be reported once there are at least two comparable periods. FDE Times Hiring Tracker data shows 440 open Forward Deployed Engineer roles on 9 October 2026, up from 318 at the end of the first tracking day, 7 October. That jump comes from wider coverage, not from hiring. 131 roles entered the count when the boards of 35 companies started being tracked, and with those set aside, open roles fell by 9 over the period. ## Closures outnumbered new postings Between 8 October and 9 October, 12 roles were taken down from companies' careers boards. 3 new roles appeared on boards that were already being tracked. Counted from the posting dates the companies give, the 12 closed roles had been open for a median of 56 days, and all 12 carried a posting date. ![Open FDE roles, day by day](/graphics/reports/hiring-2026-10-10/en/daily.svg) *Lighter: roles from newly tracked companies, not new hiring. Source: FDE Times Hiring Tracker, companies' own careers boards.* 4 companies cut their open count and 2 raised it. Cohere fell from 16 to 13 after closing 3 roles. Palantir went from 111 to 109 and Scale AI from 18 to 16, each closing 2, and Anthropic dropped from 7 to 6. Only Databricks and Shield AI added roles. Databricks posted 2 new roles and rose from 123 to 125. Shield AI posted 1 and went from 4 to 5. ## Databricks and Palantir lead the board Databricks had 125 open roles at the end of the period and Palantir had 109. OpenAI followed with 30, then Scale AI with 16 and Cohere with 13. Some of the newly tracked companies already sit in the top 10: Cursor and ElevenLabs had 11 each, Cresta 10, and Chalk and Notion 9 each. The number of companies with open roles was 47 at the end of the period, against 12 at the start. 47 is also the number of companies with at least one FDE role seen since tracking began. ![What kind of FDE role](/graphics/reports/hiring-2026-10-10/en/roles.svg) *Source: FDE Times Hiring Tracker, companies' own careers boards.* The classic title still dominates. 287 roles, or 65%, are Forward Deployed Engineer posts. Deployment strategists account for 61 roles (14%), product, architect and lead roles for 52 (12%), and AI / ML FDE roles for 40 (9%). ![Seniority of open roles](/graphics/reports/hiring-2026-10-10/en/seniority.svg) *Source: FDE Times Hiring Tracker, companies' own careers boards.* Mid-level roles make up 51% of the count, at 224. Senior, staff and lead roles number 176 (40%). Early-career openings are scarce, at 40 roles or 9%. ## Python is named in 74% of roles Python appears in the descriptions of 325 open roles, or 74%. AI agents come next, named in 253 roles (58%). Among other languages, JavaScript is named in 186 roles (42%) and TypeScript in 168 (38%). ![Skills most named in job descriptions](/graphics/reports/hiring-2026-10-10/en/skills.svg) *Source: FDE Times Hiring Tracker, companies' own careers boards.* APIs are named in 174 roles (40%) and machine learning in 170 (39%). On cloud platforms, AWS is named in 145 roles (33%), Azure in 133 (30%) and GCP in 128 (29%). LLMs are named in 126 roles, also 29%. ## North America holds 60% of open roles North America accounts for 265 open roles, or 60%. Europe & UK has 92 (21%), Asia-Pacific 61 (14%) and other places 20 (5%). 2 postings say only that the role is remote and name no place. ![Open FDE roles by region](/graphics/reports/hiring-2026-10-10/en/regions.svg) *Source: FDE Times Hiring Tracker, companies' own careers boards.* By city, New York leads with 38 open roles. London and Washington, D.C. have 34 each, then come San Francisco with 27 and Chicago with 11. Outside the US and UK, Tokyo has 9, Seoul 7 and Paris 6. 107 roles, or 24%, are marked as remote or open to remote work. Posted pay ranges in 179 US postings, from 21 companies, put the median midpoint of base pay at $216,000. The median bottom of the range is $182,000 and the median top is $250,000. The lower-quartile midpoint is $168,000, and the upper-quartile midpoint is also $216,000. ## Methodology - **Source:** the official careers boards (Greenhouse, Ashby, Lever) of companies that hire FDEs, read several times a day. Only roles whose title names forward deployed engineering or deployment strategy count; 47 companies have had at least one such role since tracking began. - **Period:** 7 October 2026 to 9 October 2026, UTC. - **New roles:** roles first seen on the board of a company that was already tracked. Roles from a company whose board was just added are wider coverage, not new hiring. - **Closed roles:** roles the company took down. Days open are counted from the posting date the company gives. - **Role type and seniority** are read from the job title; **region** from the location in the posting. - **Pay:** only base-pay ranges published in US-located postings; the figure is the median of each range's midpoint. Full data for this edition: [/api/hiring-reports/hiring-2026-10-10.json](/api/hiring-reports/hiring-2026-10-10.json). Live, daily figures: [FDE Hiring Tracker](/en/fde-hiring/). Earlier editions: [FDE Hiring Reports](/en/fde-hiring/reports/). ## Sources - [FDE Times Hiring Tracker](https://fdetimes.net/en/fde-hiring/) - [Data for this edition (JSON, hiring-2026-10-10)](https://fdetimes.net/api/hiring-reports/hiring-2026-10-10.json)