Last week I shared some examples and stats about companies expanding their FDE programs. “Forward Deployed” was hot last year and is now a central part of AI GTM.
AI is easy to try. Making it "work" in an Enterprise is a different problem.
Forward Deployed teams help fill that gap.
In January, Intercom and Cresta were the only two companies I'd seen hiring both Forward Deployed Engineers and Forward Deployed Product Managers. Intercom had FD Data Scientists too. Three distinct "forward deployed" roles, working together.
Three months later, I’m seeing the pattern across AI and SaaS companies.
I track 200+ of the top AI companies for GTM hiring. Of those actively hiring, 39% have “Forward Deployed” roles. 304 open positions.
Palantir pioneered this in the early 2010s. In 2025, a16z called FDEs "the hottest job in startups". FDE postings grew 1,165% year-over-year.
Now in 2026, it's becoming a permanent piece of the post-sales, AI-native, go-to-enterprise playbook.
And the role itself is evolving FDE (engineers) is becoming FDX (everything).
Let’s dig in…
The FDE function wasn't a fad
The volume is accelerating. OpenAI went from 28 to 43 FDE roles in three months. Mistral AI went from 5 to 21. Databricks entered with 17 roles and a Head of AI FDE for Asia-Pacific. These aren't experiments.
Management layers are deepening. 47 management/leadership FDE roles across 24 companies. OpenAI alone has 11 management positions in the FDE org—managers, technical deployment leads, a platform engineering manager, an ops lead, an infrastructure engineering manager, and a dedicated Life Sciences FDE manager. That's a full org chart for a function that barely existed two years ago.
Big investment, real comp. Top FDE roles in the index by listed comp.
Company | Role | Comp Range |
|---|---|---|
Harvey | Director, FDE | $320K-$360K |
Postman | Head of FDE | $300K-$350K |
Invisible Technologies | Principal FDE | $248K-$370K |
Parloa | Senior FDE (US) | $230K-$330K |
Notion | FDE, Developer Platform | $213K-$320K |
"Founding" roles keep appearin, and the early ones are graduating. Harvey went from "Founding FDE" in January to "Director of FDE" at $320K-$360K. Anthropic went from "Founding FDE, Applied AI" to "Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering." The founding phase is over at these companies. It's an org now.
Meanwhile, a new wave is building from scratch: Glean (3 Founding FDEs + 3 FDPMs), Dust ("Founding AI Deployment Strategist"), Credal ("Founding GTM Deployment Strategist"), Poolside AI, and Reducto.
FDE is becoming FDX (Forward Deployed Everything)
FDE is becoming FDX: Forward Deployed everything.
Many companies now run PMs and Engineers side by side. Here are some examples:
Company | FDE PMs | FDE Engineers | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
Cresta | 2 | 7 | Explicit PM/Engineer pairing — "you'll partner with FDEs who support the build" |
Glean | 3 | 3 | Building from scratch at $160K-$270K. Chose FDE pods over traditional SE. |
Scale AI | 1 | 5 | Added PM role alongside Engineers and Managers |
Sendbird | 2 | 1 | Messaging platform, new to FDE model |
Gradial | 3 | 2 | PM-heavy, interesting signal |
Intercom appears to run a three-headed model:
FDE (Engineer): "Coding side-by-side with customers, custom integrations"
FDPM: "Configuration, demos, cross-functional coordination"
FD Data Scientist: "Measurement, analytics, best practices"
The FDPM owns customer outcomes. The FDE handles technical implementation. Neither needs to be expert in both. This mirrors how engineering orgs developed distinct IC ladders (frontend, backend, infra).
As AI tools get more powerful, the bottleneck shifts from "can we build it?" to "do we understand what to build?" Domain experts who wield AI may be more valuable than AI engineers who must learn domains.
AI companies are all about winning the Enterprise
FDEs take you beyond POCs.
Big customers want AI, but they need more than technology. Vendors are speaking to this directly in these job posts.
Cohere: "Acting as the bridge between our core North platform and enterprise engineering teams."
Mistral AI: "Operating like startup CTOs who own end-to-end execution of high-stakes projects."
That's where your AI gets sticky. Building specialized skills, workflows, integrations. Making agents like a highly trained teammate, not a vanilla chatbot.
And it's not just AI-native companies anymore. Notion, Stripe, Airtable, Webflow, Outreach, and Postman all have FDE roles. Notion's JD: "We're evolving from a loved product for teams to an essential AI platform for some of the world's largest customers." They're paying FDEs $213K-$320K to make that evolution real
What I’m Watching
Founding → Director pipeline. Harvey and Anthropic went from founding to management in under a year. Which of today's "founding" companies (Glean, Dust, Credal, Poolside, Reducto) will be hiring Directors by Q4?
SaaS → AI transition. If Notion, Airtable, Outreach, and Webflow are hiring FDEs, who's next? Any SaaS company adding AI features to their enterprise product faces the same implementation gap. FDEs are becoming a key investment for SaaS companies expanding into AI.
When "Engineer" fully disappears. Runway's FD Finance Partner. FloQast's FD Accountant. Will this be more about domain expertise and less about technical skills over time?
Can tech companies do professional services? Databricks explicitly calls FDE a "professional services" function. The a16z argument is that services-led growth builds moats. Traditional SaaS thinking was gross margin sensitive. AI companies seems to think differently. Curious how this will play out.