State of FDE Hiring tracker counts 2,188 open roles across 90 companies
A live ATS snapshot updated 13 October 2026 finds 2,188 forward deployed and adjacent on-site technical roles at 90 companies, with 78% on-site, a $168K median salary floor where listed, and Databricks, OpenAI and Palantir leading by volume.
Forward Deployed Jobs published an updated State of FDE Hiring snapshot on 13 October 2026, drawn from scraped public ATS feeds rather than a survey. It currently tracks 2,188 open forward deployed and adjacent on-site technical roles across 90 companies.
Workplace mix stays customer-heavy: 78% on-site, 4% hybrid, and 18% remote. Where employers publish a salary floor (466 roles), the range runs from about $80K to $296K with a median of $168K.
By open-role count, the leaders are Databricks (494), OpenAI (161), and Palantir (121), followed by Cloudflare and Stripe (87 each), then Datadog, Zscaler, ElevenLabs, MongoDB, and Snowflake. Top location hubs include San Francisco, London, Singapore, Tokyo, New York, Washington D.C., Paris, and Sydney.
For FDEs and candidates, the takeaway matches other trackers this month: the market is wide, but the core of the work is still embedding with the customer. Remote shows up; it is not the default.
Source: forwardeployedjobs.com