FDE Times: Levels.fyi’s $223K FDE median is total compensation; job-post medians sit near $182K–$195K base
An 5 November FDE Times analysis shows why US FDE pay figures disagree: Levels.fyi’s $223K median (155 self-reports, checked 4 November) includes annualised stock and bonus, while Fast AI Jobs ($182K) and Recruiting From Scratch ($195K) read advertised base ranges. Comparing an all-base offer to the wrong median flips whether it looks low or high.
FDE Times compared three widely cited US Forward Deployed Engineer pay numbers on 4–5 November 2026 and found they are not measuring the same thing.
Levels.fyi showed a $223,000 median from 155 self-reported packages, defined as base plus annualised stock plus bonus (P25 $170K, P75 $290K, P90 about $351K). Fast AI Jobs, reading AI startup listings and taking midpoints, put the median at $182,000 from 259 published salaries. Recruiting From Scratch’s June 2026 careers-page study of 924 FDE posts put it at $195,000, with a $160K–$215K P25–P75 band—less than half as wide as Levels.fyi’s spread, which FDE Times attributes largely to equity variation.
That gap matters in negotiation. An all-base $200K offer looks $23K under the Levels.fyi median but $5K above the Recruiting From Scratch median. A $175K base plus $50K annualised stock looks near Levels.fyi while sitting in the lower half of posted base bands—and the stock only pays out on the vesting schedule and valuation. The working rule the piece argues for is to compare total compensation with self-reported TC data, and base with advertised ranges after asking what those ranges include.
Outside the US the data thins fast. Levels.fyi’s India FDE median rests on 12 salaries; Salary.com’s India figure is from April 2025 with no sample size. FDE Times treats both as a wide reference range, not a settled market number, and argues that reading pay sources the way an FDE reads customer data—who collected it, what fields, how many rows—is part of the job.
Source: fdetimes.net