Salesforce sheds 13 FDE roles as Databricks extends its lead

FDE Times Hiring Tracker data shows 641 open Forward Deployed Engineer roles on 8 November 2026, down from 646 on 2 November. The tracker began reading the boards of 4 more companies this week, Anyscale, Avoca, Reducto and Special, which added 5 roles to the count. That is wider coverage, not hiring: with those roles left out, the change in open roles was -10, after a change of 2 in the week from 26 October to 1 November.

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

The number of companies with at least one open role rose from 95 to 97. Open counts went up at 13 companies and down at 11.

Salesforce posts the steepest fall

Salesforce had the largest drop of any company on the tracker, from 40 open roles to 27, a change of -13. The board was busy in both directions: Salesforce took down 36 roles during the week and posted 23 new ones.

Palantir fell from 108 to 100, with 8 roles closed and no new postings. Cloudflare went from 11 to 8, and Broadcom, Parloa, Shield AI and UiPath each lost 2. Factory and Render each closed their only open role and ended the week with none.

Databricks and OpenAI lead the gains

Databricks posted the largest rise, from 114 to 122 open roles, after adding 13 and closing 5. That leaves it at the top of the company table with 122, ahead of Palantir on 100 and OpenAI on 37.

OpenAI itself grew from 32 to 37, with 7 new roles against 2 closed. ElevenLabs went from 12 to 14 and Invisible Technologies from 6 to 8, both without closing a role. Anthropic, Glean, Modal, NVIDIA, Rogo, Scale AI, Snowflake and Thomson Reuters each added 1 to their open count.

More roles closed than opened

Across tracked boards, 73 roles were taken down this week, against 65 in the previous week. New postings came to 63, against 67 the week before. Every one of the 73 closed roles carried a posting date, and the median closed role had been open for 25 days.

Mid-level FDE roles make up the largest group

Forward Deployed Engineer titles account for 407 open roles, or 63% of the total. Deployment strategists number 84 (13%), product, architect and lead roles 83 (13%), and AI / ML FDE roles 67 (10%).

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

By seniority, mid-level roles lead with 350, or 55%. Senior, staff and lead roles come to 238 (37%), while early-career openings number 53, just 8%.

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

North America holds 371 open roles (58%), Europe & UK 127 (20%) and Asia-Pacific 89 (14%). Some 159 roles, or 25%, are marked as remote or open to remote work, while only 5 name no place at all. New York leads the city list with 69 roles, followed by London on 44 and San Francisco and Washington, D.C. on 34 each.

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

On pay, posted pay ranges in 219 postings from 41 companies, all US-located, give a median range of $180,000 to $250,000 and a median midpoint of $216,000. The lower quartile of midpoints sits at $168,000.

Machine learning climbs the skills list

Python remains the skill most often named in job descriptions, in 427 open roles or 67%, against 68% the week before. AI agents appear in 383 roles (60%) and APIs in 274 (43%), down from 45%.

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

Machine learning moved up, from 214 roles (33%) to 232 (36%), overtaking JavaScript and TypeScript. AWS rose from 28% to 30% and GCP from 24% to 26%. Azure entered the top 10 at 25%, while ETL / data pipelines, at 26% in the previous week, dropped out of it.

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; 106 companies have had at least one such role since tracking began.
• Period: 2 November 2026 to 8 November 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-2026-11-09.json. Live, daily figures: FDE Hiring Tracker. Earlier editions: FDE Hiring Reports.