One, four or five years: FDE Times compares the experience bar in Palantir, Anthropic and OpenAI FDE job ads
An FDE Times analysis of three Forward Deployed Engineer ads finds Palantir asking for 1+ years after university, Anthropic (Munich) 4+ years in a customer-facing technical role, and OpenAI (Financial Services) 5+ years, with travel rising from up to 25% to up to 50%.
FDE Times put three current Forward Deployed Engineer job ads side by side and found the same title hides very different entry bars. Palantir's ad asks for at least 1 year of experience after university and up to 25% travel. Anthropic's Munich role wants 4+ years in a technical, customer-facing role plus production LLM work (prompting, agents, evals), with deliverables such as MCP servers, sub-agents and agent skills, and 25–50% travel. OpenAI's Financial Services FDE role asks for 5+ years and ownership of multiple customer deployments from prototype to stable production, with up to 50% travel required.
The piece argues the gap between tiers is not programming languages, which overlap heavily, but proven customer-facing work and shipping LLM systems to production. It cautions that this is a reading of one ad per company, not a rule for every lab FDE role.
Why it matters for FDE candidates: apply to the tier that matches the years you already have, and use study time to build verifiable evidence (for example, a small agent with evals that a non-engineer actually uses) rather than expecting a short course to substitute for years of experience. It also recommends asking about the team's real travel ratio early in interviews.
Source: fdetimes.net