FDE hiring this week: Open FDE roles reach 455 as tracker coverage widens

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 455 open Forward Deployed Engineer roles on companies’ own careers boards on 11 October 2026, up from 318 at the end of the first tracking day, 7 October. That headline number mostly reflects a wider net rather than more hiring. Of the roles counted, 145 entered because 41 companies’ boards started being tracked during the period, and the hiring change excluding that coverage was -8.

The number of companies with open FDE roles went from 12 at the start to 53 at the end, a figure that also includes the newly tracked boards. The newly covered names include Cursor, ElevenLabs, Notion, Stripe, Snowflake, Datadog and CoreWeave.

Lighter: roles from newly tracked companies, not new hiring. Source: FDE Times Hiring Tracker, companies’ own careers boards.

A few big employers lost roles while 2 added them

Among companies tracked from the start, 2 increased their open count and 4 reduced it. Databricks went from 123 to 125 open roles with 2 new postings, and Shield AI from 4 to 5. No other company added roles.

On the other side, Cohere fell from 16 to 13 after closing 3 roles, Palantir from 111 to 109, Scale AI from 18 to 16 and Anthropic from 7 to 6. Across the tracker, counted from 8 October, 4 new postings appeared on boards already being tracked and 12 roles were taken down. The 12 closed roles had been open for a median of 56 days, based on the posting dates the companies give.

Databricks, with 125 open roles, and Palantir, with 109, remain well ahead of the rest of the top-10 list. OpenAI follows with 30, then Scale AI with 16 and Cohere with 13.

The classic FDE title dominates, and mid-level roles lead

Roles titled Forward Deployed Engineer account for 301 openings, or 66% of the total. Deployment strategist roles make up 61, or 13%, while product, architect and lead roles add 52, or 11%. FDE roles explicitly in AI or machine learning number 41, or 9%.

Source: FDE Times Hiring Tracker, companies’ own careers boards.

By seniority, mid-level roles are the largest group with 233 openings, 51% of the count. Senior, staff and lead roles number 177, or 39%. Early-career openings are scarce at 45, or 10%, which matters for engineers trying to move into the job from elsewhere.

Source: FDE Times Hiring Tracker, companies’ own careers boards.

North America holds 60% of openings, with London second among cities

North America accounts for 275 open roles, or 60%. Europe and the UK have 94, or 21%, and Asia-Pacific 63, or 14%. Only 2 postings say remote without naming any place, although 112 roles, or 25%, are marked as remote or open to remote work.

Source: FDE Times Hiring Tracker, companies’ own careers boards.

New York leads the city list with 41 open roles, followed by London with 35, Washington, D.C. with 34 and San Francisco with 27. Further down, Tokyo has 10, Honolulu and Seoul 8 each, and Paris 6.

Python is the common language, and AI agents are close behind

Python is named in 332 open role descriptions, or 73%. AI agents appear in 257, or 56%. JavaScript, at 41%, and TypeScript, at 37%, show how much front-end and integration work the job involves, with APIs named in 40% of descriptions.

Source: FDE Times Hiring Tracker, companies’ own careers boards.

All three big clouds appear: AWS in 33% of descriptions, Azure in 30% and GCP in 29%. Machine learning is named in 38% and LLMs in 29%.

Posted pay ranges in 180 postings, from 22 companies located in the US, put the median low end at $182,000 and the median high end at $250,000. The median midpoint is $216,000, the same as the 75th percentile, while the 25th percentile midpoint is $168,000.

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; 53 companies have had at least one such role since tracking began.
• Period: 7 October 2026 to 11 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-2026-10-12.json. Live, daily figures: FDE Hiring Tracker. Earlier editions: FDE Hiring Reports.