FDE hiring this week: open roles reach 461 as Snowflake adds the most

Open Forward Deployed Engineer roles rose from 456 to 461 in the week from 12 October to 18 October 2026, FDE Times Hiring Tracker data shows. Hiring accounts for 4 of those roles. The other 1 belongs to Monumental, whose careers board started being tracked this week, so it reflects wider coverage rather than new demand.

Over the week, 22 new postings appeared on boards that were already tracked, and 18 roles were taken down. The number of companies with at least one open FDE role was 53 at the start of the week and 53 at the end.

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

Snowflake leads the risers while Palantir turns over the most roles

Nine companies changed their open count during the week: 6 went up and 3 went down. Snowflake rose the most, from 6 to 8, with 2 new postings and none closed. Anthropic (6 to 7), Column (1 to 2), Shield AI (5 to 6) and Vercel (1 to 2) each added 1.

Saronic also rose, from 7 to 8, but as the net of 2 new postings and 1 closure. Palantir was the busiest board: it posted 4 roles and closed 5, leaving it at 108 open roles, down from 109.

On the way down, MongoDB went from 6 to 5. Maven AGI took down its single open role and now lists 0.

Databricks and Palantir remain the largest employers

Databricks tops the table with 125 open roles and was not among the companies whose count changed. Palantir follows with 108, then OpenAI with 30, Scale AI with 16 and Cohere with 13.

All 18 roles that came down this week carried a posting date from the company. Counted from that date, they stayed open for a median of 78 days.

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

By role type, classic Forward Deployed Engineer titles make up 66% of open roles, or 306. Deployment strategists account for 13% with 62 roles, product, architect and lead roles for 11% with 52, and AI / ML FDE roles for 9% with 41.

Mid-level roles make up 52%, with 44 open to early-career engineers

Mid-level positions account for 52% of open roles, or 241 postings. Senior, staff and lead roles make up 38%, with 176. Early-career engineers have 44 roles to aim for, 10% of the total.

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

North America holds 61% of roles, and New York and London lead the cities

North America has 280 open roles, a 61% share. Europe & UK has 94 (20%) and Asia-Pacific 64 (14%). Some 116 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 37, Washington, D.C. with 33 and San Francisco with 28. In Asia, Tokyo has 9 and Seoul 8.

Python and AI agents are the skills employers name most

Python is named in the descriptions of 334 open roles, or 72%. AI agents come next at 258 roles (56%), followed by APIs and JavaScript at 40% each. Machine learning and TypeScript both stand at 37%, and LLMs appear in 30% of postings.

Among cloud platforms, AWS is named in 32% of roles, Azure in 29% and GCP in 28%.

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

On pay, posted pay ranges in 179 postings in the US, from 22 companies, put the median midpoint at $216,000. The median low end is $182,000 and the median high end $250,000. At the 25th percentile the 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; 54 companies have had at least one such role since tracking began.
• Period: 12 October 2026 to 18 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-2026-10-19.json. Live, daily figures: FDE Hiring Tracker. Earlier editions: FDE Hiring Reports.