Tokn reads 41 European FDE job ads: Mistral AI leads, London and Paris dominate, and pay is almost never published

Tokn, a European AI jobs board, published a breakdown of 41 forward deployed engineer ads it tracked across 14 companies in Europe as of 14 October 2026. Mistral AI posted the most (10), followed by OpenAI and Databricks (6 each), Anthropic (4), Cohere (3), and Cursor, Lovable and Scale AI (2 each). London (11 ads) and Paris (9) were the main hubs, and all 9 remote ads were limited to a single country or region.

The ads read as engineering jobs, not sales: 16 of 41 said the hire would write or ship production code, while only 3 mentioned demos. Solutions engineer ads were the reverse, with demos in 27 of 40. Where a minimum was stated, the median ask was five years of experience (Mistral asked for 2+, some Anthropic and Lovable roles for 8+), and the 15 ads that quantified travel all put it between 20% and 50%. Python and agents each appeared in 28 ads, and nine used "founding FDE" wording, a sign many European teams are only now being built.

Pay transparency is poor: none of the 41 FDE ads listed a salary. The one published band Tokn found was Anthropic's London FDE role at £225,000–£255,000 base, which it stresses is a single data point at a top lab rather than a market rate.

For FDE candidates in Europe, the takeaway is that the labs and data platforms are hiring now, mostly on-site or regional-remote with heavy travel, and that a role which never mentions shipping software is likely a solutions job under a newer title.