Lenny's late-2026 job market report: FDE openings up 4.6x in a year to about 1,500, while overall engineering openings stall

Lenny Rachitsky's latest State of the Tech Job Market report, published November 10 and based on TrueUp data covering job openings at more than 9,000 tech companies, singles out the forward deployed engineer as the standout trend inside engineering. It says open FDE roles numbered only a few dozen globally for years, mostly at Palantir, began climbing in 2025, and are up 4.6x in the past year to around 1,500 today.

That growth comes against a flat backdrop: total engineering openings rose only 2.5% over the past year, and there are fewer open engineering roles at tech companies now than in March. The report also notes security engineering is one of the fastest-growing specialties, just behind FDE, while mobile and front-end openings have nearly halved.

Rachitsky adds a caveat worth keeping in mind: some of the jump likely reflects other jobs, such as sales engineer, being retitled as FDE rather than purely new demand. The report's companion hiring figures from Live Data Technologies, which count actual US hires into the title, were covered separately on fde.me.

For engineers weighing a move, the numbers suggest FDE is one of the few engineering paths where openings are still expanding quickly, but candidates should read each posting closely to tell genuine embedded engineering roles from rebranded pre-sales jobs.