FDE hiring this week: open roles reach 461 as Snowflake adds the most

Between 12 and 18 October 2026, open Forward Deployed Engineer roles tracked by FDE Times rose from 456 to 461 across 53 companies. Twenty-two new postings appeared on boards that were already tracked and 18 roles came down; of the five-role net rise, four were real hiring and one came from newly tracked Monumental.

Snowflake led the risers, moving from 6 to 8 open roles with two new postings and none closed. Anthropic, Column, Shield AI and Vercel each added one; Saronic rose from 7 to 8 as the net of two adds and one close. Palantir was the busiest board, posting four roles and closing five to finish at 108. Databricks stayed on top with 125 openings, followed by Palantir, OpenAI (30), Scale AI (16) and Cohere (13). Closed roles had been open a median of 78 days.

Classic FDE titles still make up 66% of openings. Mid-level roles are 52%, senior/staff/lead 38%, and early-career about 10% (44 roles). North America holds 61% of roles; New York, London, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco lead the city list. Python appears in 72% of descriptions and AI agents in 56%. Across 179 US postings with pay ranges, the median midpoint is $216,000.

For candidates, the week’s signal is steady demand with Snowflake and a few mid-size boards expanding, while Palantir keeps high turnover. Skills that show up most—Python, agents, APIs and JavaScript—remain the practical prep list.