// METHODOLOGY
How the State of FDE dataset was built
Everything needed to reproduce the 519-posting, 57-employer snapshot. The guiding rule was compliance first: only sources whose own terms permit collection, extracted facts and link-backs rather than republished text, and a deterministic coding rubric anyone can re-run.
1. Sources, and why only these three
Data came from exactly three public, unauthenticated ATS job-board APIs, chosen because each operator's own documentation permits fetching public postings:
- Lever Postings API - Lever's own docs state published jobs "may be scraped by third parties."
- Greenhouse Job Board API - "Job Board data is publicly available, so authentication is not required for any GET endpoints."
- Ashby Public Job Posting API - a documented public, no-auth endpoint for currently published postings.
Deliberately excludedbecause their terms prohibit collection: LinkedIn, Indeed, Wellfound/AngelList, YC Work-at-a-Startup, Google for Jobs, and any re-scraped "open" dataset that launders one of those. Lever's robots signalai-train=no is honored: this data is for statistical/reference analysis, never model training.
2. Collection
A hand-curated seed list of AI-native, data-platform, fintech, dev-tools, and gov-tech companies known to hire FDE-family roles on those three ATSs. Each company's board slug was resolved from its public careers URL, then its one public JSON endpoint was fetched once, rate-limited to no more than one request per second, with an identified User-Agent. No login, no paywall bypass, no IP rotation. The full list of contributing boards ships inside the dataset's meta.boards_contributing.
3. Inclusion and exclusion
Included if the posting was live and its title or description matched the FDE-family lexicon: forward deployed, FDE, FDSE, applied AI/ML engineer, deployment engineer or strategist, field engineer, implementation engineer, and solutions engineer/architect where the role involves production coding or customer-embedded delivery.
Excluded: pure pre-sales or quota-only solutions/sales roles with no coding, support/success roles, internships, expired postings, and duplicate cross-posts (deduped on employer + normalized title + location).
4. The true-FDE authenticity rubric
Each posting is scored 0-2 on five axes. A role counts as a "true FDE" if it scores at least 1 on production coding AND at least 1 on customer embedding AND reports into engineering or product with no quota/OTE language.
| Axis | 0 | 1 | 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Production coding | no coding / aptitude only | scripts, some coding | ships production software |
| Customer embedding | remote advisory only | some on-site collaboration | embedded / heavy travel |
| Reporting line | Sales / GTM | Services / Delivery | Engineering / Product |
| Comp structure | quota + commission + OTE | base + bonus | base + equity, no quota |
| AI / data depth | none | uses vendor APIs | builds ML / RAG / pipelines |
The coding is a deterministic, temperature-0 keyword rubric, auditable back to text spans in the source posting. It is not human-adjudicated for every row, so spot-checking is recommended.
5. What gets published (and what doesn't)
Published: aggregate statistics, a per-posting fact table of extracted attributes, and a link back to each live posting. Notpublished: verbatim job-description prose (that is the employer's copyright), and anything from a prohibited source. Extracted facts plus a link are citable without republishing anyone's creative text.
6. Limitations
This is the state of FDE hiring among AI-native and infrastructure companies on public ATS boards, not the whole market. It skews to US / venture-backed companies and under-covers large enterprises on private ATSs, EMEA/APAC, and staffing listings. It is a point-in-time snapshot (open roles, not hires), so trend claims need a second edition. Full limitations are listed on the report.