FDE hiring this week: Closures outnumber new roles as like-for-like openings fall by 22

On a like-for-like basis, hiring for Forward Deployed Engineers shrank in the week from 19 October to 25 October 2026. FDE Times Hiring Tracker data shows 45 roles taken down from companies’ careers boards and 23 new postings. Once newly tracked boards are set aside, the open count fell by 22.

The headline total moved the other way, from 461 open roles at the start of the week to 625 at the end. That rise reflects wider coverage, not hiring growth. A further 186 roles entered the count because the tracker began reading the boards of 45 more companies, including Salesforce, NVIDIA, Cloudflare and Cognition.

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

Closures jumped while new postings held steady

The 45 closed roles compare with 18 in the previous week, from 12 October to 18 October, an increase of 27. New postings barely moved, at 23 this week against 22 a week earlier. In that previous week, the like-for-like count had risen by 4.

All 45 closed roles carried a posting date from the company. The median closed role had been open for 72 days before it came down.

Databricks and Palantir led the decline

Among companies whose open count changed, 10 went down and 3 went up. Databricks fell from 125 open roles to 121, with 6 new postings and 10 closures. Palantir went from 108 to 105, with 6 new and 9 closed.

Brex took down both of its roles, leaving 0, and Cohere and Coinbase each lost 2. Cresta, Cursor, Intercom, Outreach and Scale AI each closed 1 role. The only gains came from Snowflake, up 2 to 10, and from Baseten and Together AI, each up 1 to 3.

Databricks, with 121 open roles, and Palantir, with 105, still have the largest open counts, ahead of Salesforce on 31 and OpenAI on 30. At the start of the week 53 companies had at least one open FDE role, and by the end 96 did. The 45 newly tracked companies were added during the same week.

Mid-level FDE titles lead an open pool centred on North America

Of the 625 open roles, 407, or 65%, carry a Forward Deployed Engineer title. Product, architect and lead roles account for 82. Deployment strategists account for 76 and AI/ML FDE roles for 60.

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

By seniority, 330 roles (53%) are mid level and 244 (39%) are senior, staff or lead. There are 51 early-career openings, or 8%.

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

North America accounts for 354 open roles, or 57%. Europe and the UK follow with 128 (20%), then Asia-Pacific with 86 (14%). In all, 153 roles, or 24%, are marked as remote or open to remote work, but just 5 postings say remote without naming a place.

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

New York tops the city list with 67 roles, ahead of London on 41, San Francisco on 35 and Washington, D.C. on 32. Posted pay ranges in 222 postings from 40 companies put the median midpoint for US-located roles at $216,000. The median low end is $180,000 and the median high end is $250,000.

Python is named in 68% of open roles

Python appears in the descriptions of 423 open roles, or 68%, against 72% in the previous week. AI agents are named in 370 roles (59%), up from 57%, and APIs in 280 (45%). LLMs appear in 232 roles, or 37%, up from 31%.

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

JavaScript is named in 35% of open roles, down from 40%. Azure, named in 29% of open roles a week earlier, is no longer in the top 10, while ETL and data pipelines enter at 25%. This week’s shares are measured across a pool that now includes the newly tracked boards.

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; 99 companies have had at least one such role since tracking began.
• Period: 19 October 2026 to 25 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-2026-10-26.json. Live, daily figures: FDE Hiring Tracker. Earlier editions: FDE Hiring Reports.