FDE is now the biggest AI engineering job category, with 451 open roles in one analysis

Agent Native reviewed 1,376 open AI engineering roles posted since the start of October across 159 AI companies. Forward deployed engineering was the largest family, with 451 roles at 77 companies (33%), ahead of agent engineer at 258. Titles vary, from Forward Deployed Engineer to Deployment Strategist and Agent Deployment Engineer, but the work is the same: build the agent on the customer's data and systems and stay until it runs in production.

The biggest FDE hirers were OpenAI (66), Wonderful (49), LangChain (28), Anthropic (27) and Sierra (26). Customer-service agent companies lean heavily on the role: 49 of Wonderful's 50 openings, 26 of Sierra's 67 and 21 of Decagon's 47 are forward deployed.

The trade-offs are clear in the data. FDE has the lowest median posted pay of the larger role families, about $225K at the midpoint once Anthropic and OpenAI are excluded (base only, no equity or bonus). A third of FDE ads mention travel, against 7% for other AI roles, and the most common stated figure is up to 50%. The median ask is five years of experience, and most ads don't mention a degree.

Why it matters: if you can handle messy client codebases and regular travel, FDE is the largest pool of open AI engineering jobs right now. Ask about travel early, check remote eligibility, and come ready to explain how you evaluate an agent, since evals appear in about half of all ads.