A10X Brief №14: OpenAI now hires FDEs by industry, and Microsoft pays FDEs by level like its software engineers

The 12 November edition of the A10X Brief counted 39 postings with Forward Deployed or FDE in the title on OpenAI's job board. Eleven of them name an industry: Healthcare (3), Legal (2), Cyber (2), Life Sciences (2) and Financial Services (an engineer and a manager), and six of those were posted on 5 or 6 November. The ten engineer postings share one base range of $185K to $300K plus equity, and all say travel can reach 50%.

The industry postings ask for domain background: years of customer-facing engineering in financial services or another regulated industry, or in biotech, pharma or clinical software for life sciences, while the cyber roles name SRE, DevOps and infrastructure work as routes in. A10X notes the healthcare postings say prior FDE titles and clinical credentials are not required.

At Microsoft, the brief found 16 FDE postings, 7 in the US. All 7 print pay by level, with Senior (IC4) at $119,800 to $234,700 and Principal (IC5) at $142,800 to $274,800, the same bands as Microsoft's software engineers at those levels, and none sponsor a US work visa. Outside the US, only 20 of 186 FDE postings on A10X's board print any pay at all, against 127 of 163 in the US.

Why it matters: industry experience is becoming part of the FDE match at the top labs, so engineers from banks, hospitals, pharma or security teams have a clearer way in. And at Microsoft the level you are interviewed for, not the FDE title, sets your pay, which makes asking about level early worth doing.