The number
224. That's how many open Forward Deployed Engineer roles are live, across 39 AI companies right now, per a July market scan — and FDE postings are still up more than 1,000% year over year. The signal this week isn't the count, it's the roster: the newest buyers aren't frontier labs, they're the application-layer companies built on top of them.
New roles
Cursor (Anysphere) — Forward Deployed Engineer San Francisco / London · Comp not disclosed Building a global FDE org mid-acquisition (SpaceX, reportedly ~$60B) — nobody staffs four FDE seats for a side project. View role →
Harvey — Founding Forward Deployed Engineer Remote / unspecified · Comp not disclosed An $11B company serving 100,000+ lawyers is only now hiring its founding FDE — legal AI's leader conceding the last mile needs embedding. View role →
Perplexity — Member of Technical Staff (FDE, Applied AI) New York · Comp not disclosed Lab-branded title over a functional enterprise-deployment seat — and Perplexity's first FDE in NYC. View role →
Microsoft — Forward Deployed Engineer Redmond / Mountain View / New York · $120K–$235K With Apple's req last week, every trillion-dollar company now posts FDE roles. Note the ceiling sits below OpenAI's floor. View role →
Coframe — Forward Deployed Engineer SF Bay Area · $180K–$500K A seed-stage company posting a $500K ceiling — second-widest band in the whole census. Desperation or conviction; both worth an interview. View role →
Replit — Head of Forward Deployed Engineering Foster City, CA · $300K–$400K Building an FDE org from zero — proof the role now has a management track, not just an IC ceiling. View role →
Baseten — Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (LLM) San Francisco · $260K–$380K Hiring the manager and the ICs at the same time — join the org on day zero, or run it. View role →
The FDE wave hit the application layer
Through 2025, forward-deployed hiring was a frontier-lab story — Palantir's alumni playbook, then OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind bidding up the same few hundred people. This week's board says the second wave has arrived, and it's coming from the layer above the models.
Look at who opened seats: Cursor is standing up a global FDE org in the middle of a reported ~$60B SpaceX acquisition. Harvey — $11B, 100,000+ lawyers across 1,300 orgs — is only now hiring its founding FDE, an admission that even a category leader can't ship the last mile of agent deployment without embedding. Perplexity wrapped its first NYC deployment seat in a Member-of-Technical-Staff title. Applied Compute, three ex-OpenAI researchers with $80M from Benchmark and Sequoia, is selling the forward-deployed motion itself as the product.
The infrastructure for this wave is being built in public, too. In May, Anthropic launched a ~$1.5B joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and Goldman Sachs whose stated goal, in Goldman's words, is to "democratize access to forward-deployed engineers" for mid-market firms that can't afford the talent or the consulting fees. OpenAI is reportedly building a near-identical structure with TPG and Bain.
The candidate takeaway: you no longer need a frontier-lab badge to do FDE work at scale. The entry door just got a lot wider — and the buyers now range from seed-stage startups to PE-owned mid-market.
Data: market scan via jobsbyculture (Jul 2026); Anthropic / Goldman / Blackstone JV (May 2026)