64 open roles · 14 remote · Updated daily
Forward Deployed Engineer, Forward Deployed Software Engineer, and FDE (Early Career) roles across the US — $100k–$220k, career changers welcome.
A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) embeds directly with customers to build working software on top of a company's platform — scoping the problem on-site, wiring up real data, and proving value in weeks instead of quarters. Palantir coined the title; OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI, and a wave of AI startups have made it one of the fastest-growing jobs in tech.
FDEs are hybrid engineer-consultants: part builder, part translator between what a customer needs and what the platform can do. That mix is exactly why the role is unusually open to career changers — deep domain knowledge (healthcare, finance, operations, defense) plus practical coding and AI-tool fluency routinely beats a pure computer-science pedigree.
Compensation reflects the leverage: US FDE roles typically pay $100,000–$175,000 to start, with senior FDEs at frontier AI companies reaching $200,000–$300,000+. Most roles involve customer travel and favor strong communicators.
Scale AI · London, UK · On-site
Scale AI · London, UK · On-site
Scale AI · New York, NY · On-site
Scale AI · San Francisco, CA; New York, NY · On-site
Scale AI · London, UK · On-site
Scale AI · New York, NY · On-site
Scale AI · New York, NY; Washington, DC · On-site
Scale AI · St. Louis, MO; Washington, DC · On-site
Scale AI · London, UK · On-site
Scale AI · London, UK · On-site
Scale AI · London, UK · On-site
Scale AI · Doha, Qatar · On-site
A Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) embeds with customers to build working solutions on top of a company's platform — scoping problems, integrating data, and shipping value in weeks. The title was coined at Palantir and is now standard at OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI, and many AI startups.
US Forward Deployed Engineer roles typically pay $100,000–$175,000 to start. Senior FDEs at frontier AI companies reach $200,000–$300,000+ with equity. Early-career and apprentice FDE tracks start around $100,000–$140,000.
FDE hiring weighs domain expertise and demonstrated building over credentials. The typical path: get fluent with LLM APIs and AI tooling, ship 2–3 real automation or integration projects for actual users, and lean on your industry background — ex-healthcare, finance, military, and operations candidates are actively sought because they can talk to customers engineers cannot.
Solutions engineers primarily demo and advise pre-sale; Forward Deployed Engineers write production code and ship deployments post-sale. FDE is a hands-on engineering role with customer-facing scope — closer to a startup founding engineer embedded inside the customer's team.
Palantir (the role's originator), OpenAI, Anthropic, Scale AI, Databricks, Cohere, Together AI, and hundreds of AI startups building enterprise products. There are 64 FDE roles live on this board right now, updated every 12 hours.