// ORIGINAL DATA · v1
The State of Forward-Deployed Engineering, 2026
I pulled 519 FDE-family job postings from 57 employersusing only public ATS job-board APIs (Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby), coded each one against a fixed rubric, and asked a simple question: which responsibilities do these postings explicitly describe? The aggregates describe the published July snapshot, not current vacancies. The dataset and methodology are free. There's also a companion study on agent-engineering hiring, a separate corpus targeting a different title family.
By Adam Boudjemaa · Snapshot 2026-07-21 · CC BY 4.0 · Extracted facts + link-backs only, no verbatim postings
Headline findings
of FDE/FDSE-labeled postings do not meet this study’s broad coding test
66 of 235 fail this study’s keyword-based test. Missing evidence in a posting is not proof of what the employee actually does.
meet the bar under a strict reading that also requires an explicit engineering or product reporting line
142 of 235 have the required signals plus an explicit engineering/product reporting line. An unclear reporting line also fails this stricter test.
require production coding
510 of 519 postings match the production-coding rubric. This measures posting language, not observed day-to-day work.
carry quota, commission, or on-target-earnings language
73 of 519 postings contain those terms. Confirm the compensation structure directly with the employer.
What these roles are called
The FDE title itself is only 36.2% of the family (188 of 519 postings). The label is scattered across a dozen names.
Who the postings say they report to
In this sample, 58% are coded as engineering/product and 7.7% as sales/GTM. Reporting lines are one signal to discuss with the employer, not a verdict on the role.
What they require
CORE REQUIREMENTS
TOP LANGUAGES
43.2%
onsite
34.1%
remote
22.7%
hybrid
Compensation
Only 17.3% of postings published a pay range, so treat this as directional.
$175,000
median base floor
$278,000
median base ceiling
5 yrs
median experience floor
Published base floors ranged $105K - $293K; ceilings $150K - $500K.
Get the data
Limitations (read these)
- Sampling frame: only companies on public Greenhouse/Lever/Ashby boards, from a hand-curated seed list. Skews to US / venture-backed AI-native companies; under-covers large enterprise on private ATS, EMEA/APAC, and staffing listings. This is the state of FDE hiring among AI-native/infra companies on public ATS boards, not the whole market.
- Concentration: the four largest employers (Databricks, Palantir, OpenAI, Snowflake) supply about 59% of postings, so read every aggregate as employer-weighted, not evenly spread across the market.
- Snapshot, not flow: point-in-time open roles are not hires. Trend claims need a second edition.
- Self-reported text: requirements reflect what employers write, not what they enforce.
- Derived fields (including the true-FDE bar) are coded by a keyword rubric applied to posting text; not human-adjudicated for every row.
- Compensation coverage is partial: only the 17.3% of postings with public ranges, which over-represents US pay-transparency states.
Cite this
Boudjemaa, Adam. "State of Forward-Deployed Engineering 2026," v1. adam-boudjemaa.com, 2026-07-21. https://adam-boudjemaa.com/state-of-fde. Data licensed CC BY 4.0.