CloseLook's Forward Deployment Pulse: 223 core FDE roles at six AI vendors, down 2 week over week

CloseLook's Forward Deployment Pulse, refreshed daily from public Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby boards, counted 223 core forward-deployed roles across six AI-value-chain companies on 12 October 2026, down two week over week. Including broader deployment and applied-AI titles, the total rises to 389, or 12.83% of all open roles at those employers.

By company, Databricks led core FDE postings with 100 of 889 open roles (12.5%), followed by Palantir with 79 of 310 (35.2% — the highest share). OpenAI had 26 core FDE roles of 811, Scale AI 13 of 182, and Anthropic 5 of 645. Sierra showed zero forward-deployed titles on that day's boards.

For FDEs, the pulse is a supply-side signal: vendors staff embedded engineers before deployment revenue shows up in earnings. CloseLook also notes the bearish read — a rising FDE count without product reuse can mean the business scales like consulting. The tracker sits alongside larger board-wide counts (for example FDE Times' 455-role tracker) but is narrower and more frequent, so it is useful for watching week-to-week intensity at the biggest AI employers.