Profound starts hiring "Forward Deployed Marketing Engineers", taking the FDE model to marketing teams at $100K–$200K base

Profound, an AI marketing platform that says 15% of the Fortune 500 use it, announced on October 13 that it is hiring Forward Deployed Marketing Engineers. The people in these roles embed with marketing teams at large brands, agencies and consulting partners, often onsite, and build agents and workflows in Profound that handle real work such as reporting, competitive research, content drafting and page audits.

The job ad is explicit that this is "for marketers who build, not engineers who want to learn marketing." It asks for 2 to 6 years of marketing experience. Coding is welcome but not required, and neither is a computer science degree. The role sits in Customer Success, works alongside Engagement Managers, Account Managers and Agent Engineers, and is measured on customer adoption. Listed locations are New York, San Francisco and London, with base pay of $100K–$200K in NYC and SF and £63K–£135K in London, plus regular travel to customer sites.

Why it matters for FDEs: the forward deployed model is spreading past software engineers into domain specialists who configure and build on a vendor's platform inside the customer's team. The structure will look familiar to anyone who has worked at Palantir or an AI lab: an FDE-style builder paired with an engagement manager, plus a core engineering group behind them for complex integrations. For engineers, it is a signal that "forward deployed" titles will keep getting broader, so it pays to read the requirements before assuming a role involves production code.