FDE hiring keeps scaling up, and Databricks has moved to the front
Nine months of Forward Deployed Engineer hiring across 13 companies that post the role in volume: open roles climbed sharply, Databricks split the role into industry teams and took the lead, and a layer of managers is forming · November 2025 to July 2026
In our last issue we showed that Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) means a different job at every company posting it. Follow those same companies over nine months and a second story appears: the role is scaling up fast. Across the set of companies that hire FDEs in volume, open FDE roles climbed from 106 last November to 377 by mid-July; even counting only the companies tracked the whole time, they grew from 106 to 249. One company drove the summer jump. Databricks held between 10 and 16 open FDE roles for seven straight months, then vaulted to 77 in June and 96 by mid-July, splitting the role into different verticals: public sector, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and media and entertainment.
Open Forward Deployed roles across the company set
Open FDE roles at each month-end, reconstructed from when each posting opened and closed
The role is not just getting bigger, it is growing a management layer. Hands-on engineers still make up the bulk of open FDE roles, 301 of the 377 in total, but leads and managers nearly quadrupled over the window, from 16 to 60, and recruiting and program roles posted under the Forward Deployed banner reached their high in July. Together, managers and org roles are now 20% of the set's open FDE roles, up from 18% last November.
The mix of Forward Deployed roles, by type over time
Open FDE roles across the set, split by what the hire builds, at each month-end
The overall mix hides how differently each company fills the role. The plot below breaks the mix out company by company, each panel on its own scale so the shape, not the size of the team, is what shows, and the contrasts are sharp. OpenAI spent the spring posting more FDE recruiters, program managers, and other org roles than hands-on engineers, staffing the org rather than the work. Microsoft leans the same way, with recruiting and operations a large share of its Forward Deployed postings. Databricks and Google grew a visible layer of managers as they scaled. Palantir and Snowflake are the opposite: almost every open role is a hands-on engineer, with barely any leads or managers.
Every company shapes its Forward Deployed team differently
Open FDE roles by type, company by company, at each month-end (each panel on its own scale)
The lead changed hands as the set grew. Palantir, which has run forward deployment for two decades, held the top spot through the winter. Google climbed fast once its Google Cloud generative-AI FDE roles entered our data in the spring. Then Databricks passed all of them in June and stayed there, turning a role long associated with Palantir and OpenAI into one where the enterprise-data company posts the most open seats.
Databricks climbed to the top of Forward Deployed hiring
Each company ranked by open FDE roles, month by month (rank 1 = the most)
A few caveats. We began tracking several companies in the set between March and July (Google, Microsoft, Snowflake, C3 AI, Cresta, and Tribe AI), so their lines start then and part of the overall rise reflects those additions rather than new hiring; the 106-to-249 figure covers only the companies tracked from the start. Open FDE roles are reconstructed from when each posting opened and closed, role types are read from titles, and the counts include each company's in-house equivalent of the role, such as Anthropic's Applied AI engineers. July covers the month through the 16th.
Explore the interactive infographic for the full breakdown.
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Source: Timeplot, based on public job postings from companies that hire Forward Deployed Engineers in volume, plus their in-house equivalents of the role. Data covers November 2025 to July 2026.