FDE hiring this week: closures outnumber new roles as like-for-like openings fall by 22

FDE Times' weekly Hiring Tracker, which reads companies' own Greenhouse, Ashby and Lever boards, found that 45 Forward Deployed Engineer roles came down and 23 new ones went up between 19 and 25 October 2026. Setting aside newly tracked boards, open roles fell by 22. Closures jumped from 18 the week before, while new postings held roughly flat, and the median closed role had been open for 72 days.

Databricks (125 to 121) and Palantir (108 to 105) led the declines but remain the biggest FDE employers, ahead of Salesforce (31) and OpenAI (30). Brex closed both of its roles, Cohere and Coinbase each lost two, and Snowflake, Baseten and Together AI were the only companies to add roles. The headline count rose to 625 only because the tracker added 45 more companies' boards, including Salesforce, NVIDIA, Cloudflare and Cognition.

Across the wider pool, 53% of roles are mid level, 39% senior or above and 8% early career. North America holds 57% of openings, with New York (67) ahead of London (41) and San Francisco (35). Posted US pay ranges in 222 postings give a median midpoint of $216,000, with Python named in 68% of roles and AI agents in 59%.

For FDE candidates, the takeaway is that the role is still widely open but the weekly churn is real: roles close after a couple of months, so it pays to apply early, and the biggest pools remain at Databricks and Palantir.