FDE Times: Hiring FDEs in Asia — language and customer years are hard requirements
A 4 November FDE Times guide reads closed Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore FDE ads as a requirements snapshot: OpenAI and Anthropic demand fluent Japanese and English in Tokyo; Notion wants native Korean in Seoul; Singapore screens more on travel (OpenAI cited up to 50% on site) across LLM, robotics and telecom employers.
FDE Times (4 November 2026) treats Asia-Pacific FDE ads as a requirements document, not a live jobs list—most cited postings are filled or taken down. The useful signal is what each market treats as non-negotiable.
In Tokyo, OpenAI and Anthropic listings required fluency in Japanese and English plus years of technical work with customers (not merely years as an engineer), with hybrid office norms and substantial customer travel. In Seoul, Notion’s Korea FDE ad required native-level Korean and professional working English. Singapore acts as a regional hub: OpenAI’s ad stressed on-site customer time up to about 50%, and demand also showed up at FieldAI (robotics) and Singtel (telecoms), not only foundation-model labs.
The guide’s practical matrix—language, years, type of experience, travel—helps candidates avoid counting internal API work as customer years or treating “decent Japanese” as fluency. Short-term paths often point to Singapore for bilingual-but-not-fluent profiles; Tokyo and Seoul need language and customer-facing evidence built deliberately before applying.
Source: fdetimes.net