The number
2,160. That's how many open Forward Deployed Engineer postings one fresh October 4 snapshot counts across 727 companies — 447 of them added in the last 30 days, with a median posted salary of $195,000 (middle half: $162K–$230K). The five biggest employers (Databricks, Palantir, Deloitte, AWS, OpenAI) account for only ~15% of postings, so while last month's tighter sample looked like a three-company market, the wider market is far less concentrated — and the long tail is where the new doors are opening.
What changed this week
The Plank FDE census hasn't been re-crawled since its Sept 12 observation, so there's no census diff to report this week. Our own manual sweep of frontier-lab careers pages turned up two moves worth noting:
Mistral is going after US enterprise. Applied AI "Forward Deployed Machine Learning Engineer" seats appeared on Mistral's careers board for Palo Alto (its first US FDE seat) and Montreal, on top of its existing Paris/London role. Same pattern as OpenAI and Anthropic: the lab with the sovereignty pitch now wants engineers physically near US buyers. No bands published.
Cognition's "Deployed Engineer" is fanning out. Aggregators show the title across the UK, EMEA, ANZ, Tokyo and South Korea — five-plus regions. Geo expansion at this speed usually means the customer pipeline is ahead of the bench. (Not yet verifiable on the company's own page, so treat as a signal, not a fact.)
New roles
Slow week for brand-new adds, so here are six strong live seats from the board you may have missed.
DeployCo (OpenAI Deployment Company) — Founding Forward Deployed Engineer San Francisco / New York (hybrid, up to 50% travel) · $170K–$400K + equity OpenAI spun deployment out into its own company, and this player-coach founding seat is the bet that FDE-as-a-business scales. View role →
Avoca — Forward Deployed Product Engineer New York, NY (on-site) · $160K–$300K + equity + bonus A $140K spread at a Series B voice-AI company: founding-engineer money for someone who feeds what they learn in the field straight into the roadmap. View role →
Cinder — Forward Deployed Engineer New York, NY (hybrid) · $165K–$235K + equity FDE inside Trust & Safety, explicitly not quota-carrying: embed with platform T&S teams and ship anti-abuse agents. View role →
AI Aspire (Andrew Ng / AI Fund) — Forward Deployed Engineer Mountain View, CA (on-site, 1–3 week client engagements) · $180K–$200K Short, sharp embeds at enterprise clients; the JD asks outright for Claude Code and Codex fluency. View role →
Picarro — Forward Deployment Engineer, Oil, Gas & Chemicals Remote (US; CA/TX preferred), up to 70% travel · comp not disclosed FDE leaves software: you're at refineries making emissions data land with operations teams. A door for engineers who know sensors and field data. View role →
Legion Intelligence — Senior Forward Deployed Engineer Washington, D.C. area (on-site, classified) · $160K–$200K The Palantir playbook run by Palantir's partners — TS/SCI required, so the talent pool is small and the deployment can't be remote. View role →
One insight: the "$195K median" is hiding three different markets
Pull any salary number for FDEs and you'll get one figure. Don't trust it. The nextmove snapshot puts the median posted salary at $195K across 1,724 postings that disclose pay. On our own board, the 204 US-dollar bands we track have a median midpoint of about $216K (our calculation; we skew toward curated, higher-signal roles).
But that's base salary, and a May 2026 compensation report from Perspective AI shows total comp splitting into tiers: Fortune 500 enterprise FDEs at roughly $190K–$240K mid-level, applied-AI startups at $250K–$340K, and frontier labs at $385K–$510K. Same job title, a 2x+ gap.
Where does it come from? Equity. The same report claims equity now makes up 55–70% of comp at the top of the market, up from 35–45% in 2024. (It's a vendor report, so treat the exact figures as directional.) You can see it in live bands too: Avoca posts $160K–$300K and DeployCo $170K–$400K + equity — a spread that is really a level-and-equity negotiation.
The practical read: when comparing offers, ignore the base. Ask for the equity grant, the vest schedule, and whether it's parent-company or subsidiary stock.
data: nextmove.md (Oct 4, 2026); Perspective AI, "2026 FDE Compensation Report" (May 2026).
One ask
What company should we break down next? Hit reply with one name — the most-requested one gets the next deep-dive.