Extreme Networks is staffing a four-level FDE team, from Senior at $150K to Lead Senior Principal at $210K

Extreme Networks, the enterprise networking company that says it serves more than 50,000 customers, has posted a full ladder of Forward Deployed Engineer roles on its Lever board over the past week: Senior FDE in Seattle ($150K–$170K base) and Toronto (CAD 120K–130K), Staff FDE in Seattle ($160K–$200K), and, added on 12 October, a Lead Senior Principal FDE in Seattle ($180K–$210K). All are hybrid and report to the Director of Software Systems Engineering.

The postings describe FDEs as software engineers who work with strategic customers to design, build, validate and deploy solutions on Extreme's products, owning outcomes from discovery through production readiness. Day-to-day work includes writing agents, APIs, integrations, data connectors and automation, plus tests, AI evaluations, CI/CD and observability. Preferred skills include production agentic systems, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and networking, telemetry or distributed control systems.

The Lead Senior Principal role asks for 15+ years of experience and is meant to set reference architectures and technical standards across the FDE organization, turning patterns seen in customer environments into reusable components. The Seattle postings note that Extreme cannot sponsor work visas.

Why it matters: Extreme is one of a growing number of infrastructure vendors, not just AI labs, building a formal FDE function. For network and telemetry engineers who can also ship agentic software, it is a clear on-ramp into FDE work, though the posted base pay sits below the $180K–$250K median seen at AI-native companies.