Forward Deployed Engineer Hiring Index

The numbers at a glance

Figures for October 6, 2026. A role here is one open posting, so a job advertised in three cities counts three times.

Open roles

779

Boards with a role

85 of 86

In the United States

54%

Senior level or above

33%

Publish a pay range

31%

Median posted base range, USD

$160,000 to $230,000

Median days since posted

92 days

The largest single board accounts for 16% of the roles and the five largest for 40%, so a few large employers shape the totals. Read the cells below with that in mind.

Where forward deployed roles are

The United States had 424 roles (54%), ahead of the United Kingdom with 67 (9%). Location is read from each posting's location field, and a role listed in several places is counted in the first. Roles that say only "remote" have no country and appear as not stated.

By metro area

The New York City area led the metros with 94 roles. Only metros with at least 10 roles are named; the rest are grouped.

Seniority

Level is read from the title alone. "Mid-level" means the title states no level, which is not the same as the job being mid-level: 60% of titles state none. Senior, staff, principal, lead and manager titles together are 33%.

Skills the descriptions name

Each description is checked against a fixed list of 17 terms. A skill counts once per posting, and a mention is not the same as a requirement. Skills named in fewer than 10 postings are not shown.

Public cloud means any of the three largest public cloud providers. Product and vendor names are left out of the list on purpose.

Posted pay

31% of roles (241) publish a pay range. These are the base ranges employers advertise, not what anyone is paid. Each currency is shown on its own: nothing is converted or blended. Where a posting lists several ranges, such as one per location, the span from the lowest minimum to the highest maximum is used. Figures are medians, rounded to the nearest 1,000, and they count each employer once: where one employer posts many ranges in a group, often the same range for every role, those ranges share one vote. A row appears only with at least 5 ranges from at least 3 employers.

By level

By metro area

The middle half of midpoints runs from the 25th to the 75th percentile of each posting's midpoint between its minimum and maximum.

Work mode and how long roles stay up

A work mode is shown only where the posting states one. 497 roles do. Posted dates are whatever the board shows; a posting that is re-published can look new, and long-running postings can look old.

The weekly history starts with this run, on October 6, 2026. From the second run on, the open-role count for each week is charted here.

Methodology and limitations

This is a sample, built to be checked. Here is exactly what it is and what it is not.

• A sample of boards, not the market. We read 86 employer job boards, found by searching the web for companies that publicly advertise forward deployed roles, and kept when they listed at least three such roles on the day the list was drawn up. 86 answered this week and 85 had at least one matching role. The list is fixed between reviews, so companies that start hiring this way later are missing until we add them. So are companies that use another publishing system, advertise nowhere public, or that we have not found, and real totals are higher. The sample is not random. The largest board holds 16% of the roles.
• Where the data comes from. Public job-board interfaces that employers use to publish their own openings. We do not log in. Every request carries a header that names this page, we pause between requests, make one pass a week and wait when a provider asks us to slow down.
• What counts as a forward deployed role. The title says forward deployed, forward deployment, deployment strategist or FDE; or the title is another engineer, strategist, architect or scientist title and the opening lines of the description call the job forward deployed. Recruiter, sales, marketing, legal and coordinator titles are left out. Our guide on what a forward deployed engineer is explains the role, and the glossary defines the terms.
• What we keep. Each posting is reduced to a country, a metro, a work mode, a level, a list of skills, a posted date and, where published, a pay range. Then it is discarded. No employer names, job titles, descriptions or links are stored or published.
• Small cells are never shown. No group of fewer than 10 postings, and no pay group of fewer than 5 ranges from 3 employers, is published. Small groups are folded into an "Other" row, which is itself kept above the limit, so every table adds up to the total. This follows the usual practice of statistical disclosure control.
• Level, location and skills are rules, not judgement. Level comes from the title, location from the location field and skills from fixed word lists, so a title that states no level counts as mid-level, a location we cannot place is not guessed and a skill mentioned once counts as named.
• Pay is posted pay, one vote per employer. Only annual base ranges are used, and ranges that look hourly, run backwards, span more than four times or mix currencies are dropped. Each currency is reported separately and never converted or blended. Medians count each employer once, so an employer that posts the same range on dozens of roles does not set the figure. Pay-transparency rules in several places explain why many postings in those places show a range; see pay transparency.
• Weekly, replaced each time. Every run replaces the data. Earlier weeks are kept only as the total number of open roles.

Found a mistake? Email support@forwardeployed.work and we will correct the page and update its date.

Download the data

Free to download and reuse under CC BY 4.0: share and adapt it, with credit to this page. The files hold the same numbers as this page and are replaced every week.

• Download the CSVOne tidy table: a row for each group in each table above.
• Download the JSONThe same figures with coverage, pay and weekly history, for code.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

Sources are linked so you can check them. Statements that vary by employer, or that accounts disagree about, are hedged in the text. Found a mistake? Email support@forwardeployed.work and we will correct the page and update its date.

1. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Creative Commons.
2. Dataset (schema.org type). Schema.org.
3. Pay transparency. Wikipedia.
4. Statistical disclosure control. Wikipedia.
5. ISO 4217 currency codes. Wikipedia.
6. RFC 9309: Robots Exclusion Protocol. Internet Engineering Task Force.