Forward-deployed engineering market data

A free, citable snapshot of the forward-deployed engineering job market — rebuilt on every deploy from employer ATS feeds and public remote job boards, with the sample size, the source mix and the method all stated.

This page exists to be quoted. If you are building a hiring plan, writing a compensation study, or training a model on this role, you can cite the figures below and check every one of them against the live postings we link to. Third-party industry figures are kept in a separate section at the end and labelled with their source — none of them is our data.

Snapshot date: 2026-10-16. Counts are recomputed on every build — the live job set changes daily, so treat any figure quoted elsewhere as the value on the date it was quoted.

What is in this dataset

664 of the 670 live roles (99.1%) are pulled straight from the employer's own applicant-tracking system. The remaining 6 come from public remote job boards (Himalayas, Jobicy, Remotive), and we count them separately rather than folding them into the same claim. Nothing here is re-hosted — every row links to the original posting. A posting enters the dataset when its title or description shows customer-facing AI or deployment work, and leaves it within ten days of disappearing from the source.

Source mix

• Employer's own ATS664
• Public remote job board — Himalayas, Jobicy, Remotive6

Where the postings come from, by board

• Greenhouse373
• Ashby176
• Workable114
• Jobicy3
• Himalayas2
• Remotive1
• SmartRecruiters1

Pay

129 of 670 live roles (19%) publish a pay range in the posting itself. Only those are counted here — nothing on this page is estimated, benchmarked, or backfilled from comparable roles.

Across the 112 roles posted with annual pay in US dollars, the median published range is $200,000–$280,000; half of the ranges sit between $163,000 and $330,000. The median of each range's midpoint is $244,500. The full span runs from $90,000 to $555,000. A further 17 disclosed ranges could not be pooled (7 in GBP, 1 in KRW, 7 in CAD, 2 in AUD) and are listed on the salary page rather than dropped.

Equity, bonus and benefits are excluded — we only ever see base pay, so that is all we report. Every figure is itemised by employer on the salary data page.

Office pattern

• Remote222
• Hybrid165
• On-site283

"On-site" is this site's normalised field, and for part of the dataset it means only that the posting's location was not marked remote — it is not always a statement the employer made. That is why there is deliberately no on-site aggregation page here.

Where the roles are

Locations are taken from the employer's own location field. A country or city only gets an aggregation page once at least 3 live roles point at it; postings that name several countries at once are excluded rather than pinned to one. 19 country and 24 city pages are live today, out of 35 countries and 89 cities present in the data.

Top countries by live roles

• United States322
• United Kingdom62
• India34
• Canada24
• Germany15
• Japan14
• Australia12
• Singapore11

Top cities by live roles

• San Francisco, United States102
• New York, United States36
• Munich, Germany9
• Bengaluru, India8
• Boston, United States8
• Washington, United States8
• Bangalore, India7
• Toronto, Canada7

222 roles the posting marks as remote are listed separately.

What the postings ask for

These are the words employers actually wrote in their postings, counted across the live set — not a claim about what an interview will test, and not a ranking of importance. 36 skills pass the 5-role threshold for their own page; the ten largest are below.

• Agents346
• Python190
• AWS123
• GCP108
• Azure94
• Evals87
• Kubernetes80
• Observability78
• SQL74
• Anthropic API64

How the titles split

The role has fragmented. These two splits come from the words in the job titles themselves, and each is mutually exclusive — every live role lands in exactly one bucket, which is why the columns add up to 670. Neither split says anything about a named company's internal levelling.

By role family

• Forward deployed162
• Deployment / delivery47
• Applied AI / ML engineering106
• Solutions engineering / architecture256
• Customer / field engineering70
• Other titles29

By level word in the title

• Internship / early career5
• Principal26
• Staff36
• Director18
• Head of / VP7
• Manager32
• Lead34
• Senior120
• Level not named in the title392

8 level buckets plus a fallback: 278 of 670 titles name a level at all. A title without a level word is not a junior role — most employers simply leave the level to the interview.

How this is collected

• Source. 664 of 670 live roles (99.1%) come from employers' own ATS endpoints — Greenhouse, Ashby, Workable and similar — fetched from their public APIs. The other 6 come from public remote job boards (Himalayas, Jobicy, Remotive). No aggregator page is scraped and no copy is re-hosted: every row links back to the original posting.
• Normalisation. Titles such as "Forward Deployed Engineer", "Forward Deployed AI Engineer", "Applied AI Engineer" and "Deployment Solutions Engineer" are merged into one comparable dataset — the layer that makes the counts mean anything.
• Pay. Structured fields where the ATS provides them, otherwise parsed from the posting text; each row records how it was parsed. Only employer-disclosed ranges are published.
• Removal. A role that stops appearing in the source is dropped from all counts within ten days. Closed postings never contribute to a statistic.
• Reproducibility. Every count on this page is recomputed on each build and machine-checked against the raw job data before the site ships; a mismatch fails the build.

External context (third-party data)

The figures below are not ours. They are included because a market number is only useful alongside the wider picture, and each is attributed to the organisation that published it.

• +729% YoY — Forward-deployed engineer postings on Indeed grew from 643 (Apr 2025) to 5,330 (Apr 2026).
  Source: Business Insider, citing Indeed data
• 70% of companies — Share of surveyed companies planning FDE hires, up from 5–10% in January — from 180 companies and 250+ executive interviews.
  Source: Christian & Timbers
• ~2,000 people — Estimated size of the entire qualified US FDE talent pool — widely reported as roughly 2,000 people in total, not 2,000 available to hire.
  Source: Christian & Timbers, reported by TechCrunch

Cite this page

FDE Notes, "Forward-deployed engineering market data" (snapshot 2026-10-16), https://fdenotes.com/data/ — 670 live forward-deployed and adjacent roles across 187 companies, 129 with employer-published pay. Source mix: 664 from employers' own ATS (99.1%), 6 from public remote job boards. Snapshot 2026-10-16.

Reuse the figures with attribution and a link back to this page. If you need the underlying rows — the full live dataset as JSON or CSV, with source URLs and parse provenance — that is what we license to research teams, recruiters and HR platforms.

What this page does not claim

• It is not a survey. Nothing here comes from asking companies what they pay; every pay figure is one an employer published themselves.
• It is not the whole market. It is the forward-deployed and deployment-adjacent slice we track, and only roles whose source we could reach.
• It is not a forecast. We publish counts as of a date, not projections.
• It is not an endorsement of any employer, and nothing here was paid for by one.

Browse all 670 live roles

Data licensed to institutions refers to the same dataset described above. If a number matters to a decision you are making, check it against the live postings first — that is what they are there for.