FDE hiring in October 2026: open roles fell by 25 once newly tracked boards are excluded

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 631 open Forward Deployed Engineer roles on companies’ own careers boards at 31 October 2026, against 318 at the end of the first tracking day, 7 October 2026. That gap does not reflect extra hiring. Set aside the 338 roles that entered the count because the boards of 90 companies started being tracked, and open roles fell by 25.

Wider coverage, not hiring, lifted the count

Between 8 October and 31 October 2026, boards already being tracked added 114 new postings, while 139 roles were taken down. Across the 25 days of the period, the number of companies with open roles went from 12 to 95.

That figure of 95 has to be read alongside the coverage list: 90 companies entered the count because their boards started being tracked. This is a wider view of the market, not a hiring signal.

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

All 139 closed roles carried a posting date from the company, and the median time they stayed open was 44 days.

Databricks and Palantir closed more roles than they posted

Databricks tops the table with 113 open roles, yet it also recorded the largest fall: from 123 to 113, with 17 new postings and 27 closures. Palantir went from 111 to 106, with 12 new postings and 17 closures. Cohere dropped from 16 to 13, and Scale AI from 18 to 15.

On the other side were 5 companies, none of which closed a role. OpenAI moved from 30 to 32 and Shield AI from 4 to 6, while Baseten, Harvey and Vercel each added 1.

Behind Databricks and Palantir come OpenAI and Salesforce, with 32 open roles each. Salesforce, Rogo with 17, and Cloudflare, Cognition and Cursor with 11 each all came into the count through wider coverage.

Mid-level roles account for 54%, and Python leads the skills list

The Forward Deployed Engineer group holds 407 roles, or 65%. Product, architect and lead roles number 85 and deployment strategists 82, each at 13%, while AI / ML FDE roles stand at 57, or 9%.

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

By seniority, mid-level roles number 343, or 54%. Senior, staff and lead roles number 233, or 37%. Early-career roles number 55, or 9%.

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

Python is named in the descriptions of 427 roles, or 68%, followed by AI agents in 370, or 59%, and APIs in 280, or 44%. LLMs reach 37%, JavaScript 35%, and TypeScript and machine learning 34% each. Among cloud and data skills, AWS stands at 29%, ETL / data pipelines at 26% and GCP at 25%.

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

North America holds 57% of open roles

North America has 360 roles, or 57%, Europe & UK 128, or 20%, and Asia-Pacific 85, or 13%. New York heads the city list with 68 roles, followed by London with 46, Washington, D.C. with 35 and San Francisco with 33. In Asia, Tokyo has 11, Singapore 9 and Seoul 8.

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

Postings mark 154 roles, or 24%, as remote or open to remote work. A separate group of 6 roles says remote without naming a place, and these are counted on their own in the regional breakdown.

On pay, posted pay ranges in 216 postings in the US, from 39 companies, show a median low of $180000 and a median high of $250000. The median midpoint is $216000, with a lower quartile of $168000 and an upper quartile that is also $216000. These figures cover only US postings that publish a base pay range.

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; 102 companies have had at least one such role since tracking began.
• Period: 7 October 2026 to 31 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-month-2026-10.json. Live, daily figures: FDE Hiring Tracker. Earlier editions: FDE Hiring Reports.