Pave's Hot Jobs Index ranks Forward Deployed Engineer the second-hottest job in tech for Q3

Pave, the compensation data platform, updated its Hot Jobs Index with Q3 data on November 5. The index scores every tech job family from -100 (cooling fast) to +100 (heating fast) based on how quickly its share of new hires and total headcount is changing. Forward Deployed Engineer scored 97.0, second only to AI Engineer at 97.4, while HR and marketing generalists were the coldest roles.

The jump is notable because FDE was only on Pave's Emerging Jobs watchlist in Q2. Pave describes the FDE as an engineer who embeds with customers to get a product working inside their systems, a role that has become central for AI companies helping customers adopt their models.

Pave also groups FDE with technical pre-sales and technical account management as the go-to-market roles in its top 10, arguing that buyers now expect technical people to scope integrations and prove the product on their own data, and that retention after the sale depends on configuration work that FDEs take furthest.

For FDEs, the data backs what job boards have been showing: this is headcount data from company hiring, not just postings, and it points to continued demand for engineers who can own customer deployments end to end.