The number
43. That's roughly how many open Forward Deployed Engineer reqs OpenAI is carrying right now, and the story isn't the count — it's the map. Those roles span at least twelve cities on four continents: Dublin, London, Madrid, Munich, Paris, Stockholm, NYC, Seattle, SF, Seoul, Singapore, and Sydney. Most job boards still file OpenAI's FDE under "SF/NY." The real posture is a global field-engineering org, being stood up in a hurry.
What changed this week
This week the composition of jobs moved in a direction worth naming: the FDE title went public.
Four publicly traded companies posted FDE roles in a single week. MongoDB ($MDB) stood up a newly created FDE org at the database layer. Intuit ($INTU) is embedding FDEs in its Enterprise Suite at a startup-tier 202.5K–$274K base. Braze ($BRZE) posted a Forward-Deployed Data Scientist. Addepar (late-stage, wealth-tech) added a remote FDE. When the title shows up on public-company comp bands, it has stopped being a frontier-lab curiosity.
A government flavor is emerging. Cognition (~$26B) added a "Deployed Engineer, Federal" variant ($130K–$225K base) alongside its standard SF seat. Cleared, public-sector deployment is now its own track.
The labs keep going wide, not just deep. Beyond OpenAI's twelve cities, Sierra's office footprint has expanded to ten metros (Atlanta, NYC, London, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Singapore, Tokyo, Sydney, Toronto). The frontier build-out is an international one.
New roles
MongoDB — Forward Deployed Engineer, AI Remote (US) / Ireland / Barcelona / London / Germany / Netherlands / India · $118K–$231K (Senior Staff to ~$297K) A brand-new FDE org at a public database company — embed with strategic customers to prototype and ship AI systems on Atlas and modernize legacy apps onto the platform. The title just reached the data layer. View role →
Intuit — Forward Deployed Engineer, Intuit Enterprise Suite Mountain View, CA · $202.5K–$274K base Startup-tier base at a public fintech. Report into Engineering, embed with Enterprise Suite customers shipping production automation, and sit shoulder-to-shoulder with Sales on key deals and renewals. The FDE-as-revenue-function model, inside a Fortune 500. View role →
LiveKit — Forward Deployed Engineer New York or San Francisco · $180K–$320K + equity Embed with the teams building real-time voice and video agents on LiveKit's open-source WebRTC stack. One of the wider bands on the board for a role sitting at the center of the voice-agent wave. View role →
Kepler — Forward Deployed Engineer New York City · $200K–$280K + equity Embed with $10B+ AUM financial firms to deploy an "agent harness" that wraps LLMs in deterministic pipelines so every number traces back to source. Full-stack, Rust backend. Fintech remains one of the densest FDE verticals nobody slides. View role →
Concourse — Forward Deployed Engineer New York City · $100K–$200K Own end-to-end deployments of a public-sector platform — permitting, licensing, utility billing, courts and records — inside state and local government. The full arc: discovery, scoping, ship. Govtech is quietly building its own FDE bench. View role →
Unity — Principal Forward Deployed Engineer San Francisco, CA · $228K–$342K The inward-facing FDE: sit in Engineering but embed with Finance, Legal, Marketing, People, and Ops to build the agents and automations that run the company. Proof the model works pointed at your own org, not just customers. View role →
Addepar — Forward Deployed Engineer Remote (US) · $107K–$168K base + equity Fully remote from anywhere in the US — embed with wealth-management customers to build integrations, data models, and custom workflows on the portfolio platform. A rare no-travel-mandated FDE seat in a travel-heavy field. View role →
One insight: OpenAI is building a field-engineering org, not filling a few seats
Look past the headline comp and OpenAI's FDE hiring this quarter tells you something structural: the deployment bottleneck is now the company's binding constraint on revenue, and it's being solved with headcount and geography.
The tell is the map. Roughly 43 open FDE reqs across a dozen cities — Dublin, London, Madrid, Munich, Paris, Stockholm, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, plus the US hubs — is not a team topping up. It's a field organization being stood up on four continents at once, close to where the enterprise deals are. You don't post in Madrid and Seoul simultaneously unless you've decided the deployment has to happen on-site, in-region, in the customer's timezone. That's the Palantir playbook — win the account by embedding an engineer in it — running at frontier-lab scale.
Two implications for anyone eyeing the seat. First, the international reqs are the underpriced door: EMEA and APAC bands run below the SF number (SF mid-level base is cited around $160K–$280K), but the competition is thinner and the mandate is identical. Second, "SF/NY only" is a search-bar artifact, not a fact — if you filtered OpenAI to two US cities, you missed ten. The widest entry point into the highest-paying FDE employer in the market is a plane ride from where most candidates are looking.
One ask
What company should we break down next? Reply with one — public-company FDE org, gov-tech, or a lab you want mapped city-by-city — and it goes on the shortlist.