Forward Deployed Engineer
Forward Deployed Engineers embed directly with enterprise customers to architect, build, and deploy production AI systems—from RAG pipelines and multi-agent workflows to fine-tuned models and generative applications. They translate ambiguous business problems into well-scoped technical solutions, own end-to-end delivery across the full product lifecycle, and serve as trusted technical advisors who shape both customer success and internal product direction. These roles sit at the intersection of customer needs and engineering excellence, typically within specialized services or customer-facing AI teams that work cross-functionally with product and research to turn field learnings into scalable patterns and platform improvements.
Measured across 237 of 237 open postings.
This role is advertised at 5 levels, so a single figure for the role would describe none of them. Experience and pay are the midpoints for each level on its own.
| Level | Share | Median years | Median pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intern | 7%(17) | — | — |
| Entry | 9%(21) | — | — |
| Mid | 52%(124) | 5 | $240k |
| Senior | 26%(61) | 6 | $243k |
| Staff / Principal | 5%(12) | 8 | — |
A dash means too few postings stated it to report a midpoint. Most companies do not publish a salary band, so pay is indicative rather than a market rate. 1 level with fewer than 10 open postings is not shown.
“You are someone who's built real AI systems for production and can defend the technical tradeoffs within them.”
“Design and build Cursor-powered workflows (e.g., large-scale refactors, migrations, PR review loops, incident → fix pipelines, spec → implementation systems)”
Requirements are a share of every open posting, so a role missing from this list is one where almost nobody asks. Work mode is different: many postings never say, so that figure counts only the ones that do. A posting stops being advertised when it is filled, cancelled or reorganised, so read the last figure as how long these stay on the market, not as time to hire.
Share of new postings expecting AI in the person's own work, by the week they appeared. Measured on the same 124 companies throughout, every one of them tracked since 25 May, so the line is not moved by us adding companies.
Line is a four-week average; dots are individual weeks, 11 postings each on average. Weekly values span 67 points across this window, so read the line, not the gap between two dots.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Full-stack product engineering
Technical solution advisory
Data pipeline engineering
Backend and API engineering
Cloud infrastructure operations
ML systems development
Technical issue diagnosis
Technical program management
Systems integration and APIs
Incident response and reliability
CI/CD and release automation
Enterprise AI solution architecture
LLM application development
Agent system architecture and development
Agent workflow design
AI evaluation design
Customer-facing technical delivery
Cross-functional collaboration
Technical communication
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
237 open Forward Deployed Engineer jobs across 49 companies.
Other Engineering roles
General-purpose software engineering roles focused on building and maintaining software systems. Covers generalist SWE positions that don't clearly fall into frontend, backend, fullstack, or other specialized tracks.
Engineers focused on server-side systems, APIs, services, and data processing pipelines. Includes roles explicitly labeled as backend or server-side development.
Engineers specializing in user-facing interfaces, web applications, and client-side development. Includes UI/UX engineering and web development roles.
Engineers working across the entire application stack, handling both frontend and backend responsibilities.
Engineers building and maintaining internal platforms, cloud infrastructure, compute systems, and developer tooling.