Is the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) on the Rise?

There are two types of engineers at Palantir:

1. The core engineers who build the core product. These engineers don’t typically leave the Palantir office.
2. Those who work onsite with customers to explicitly solve customer problems in the world.
   

The second bucket of engineers became popularized as Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs). Until 2016, Palantir employed more FDEs than software engineers. No other company has shaped this role more than the secretive tech company, Palantir.

Let’s explore what the data can tell us about this buzzy role.

What is a Forward Deployed Engineer?

A Forward Deployed Engineer is a type of software engineer (SWE) that acts as a hybrid engineer-consultant, working onsite directly with customers to build and implement custom solutions. Their work might involve building integrations for customers, writing customer-specific code, configuring products to fit a customer’s unique use case, and managing the technical relationship.

While Palantir is essentially synonymous with FDEs for pioneering the role, the model is spreading. Other enterprise software companies are hiring FDEs or FDE-like jobs under different titles. 

Why are Forward Deployed Engineers Trending?

Now, deep into 2025, FDE may be having a moment.

A few months ago, a16z tweeted “The forward deployed engineer is the hottest job in startups right now”.

And earlier this year, OpenAI “established a Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team who will work closely with our most strategic customers to deeply understand their use cases and design, build, and implement products for them.”

So, is the market following this trend, or are these two examples vocal outliers?

Let’s take a look at benchmarks across Pave’s database of ~9,000 integrated customers.

How Many Companies Employ Forward Deployed Engineers?

Pave’s data science team took a look at what percentage of our ~9,000 customers include at least one employee with the title of Forward Deployed Engineer (or similar). And then they mapped this onto a time series to see the overall trend.

The trend is indeed pointing towards a rapid adoption of the Forward Deployed Engineer position over the past ~two years.

I would call out that only 1.24% of companies in Pave’s dataset (as of September 2025) have the Forward Deployed Engineer position. So, it is still somewhat of a minority in the market today. This said, I would expect the trend to continue given the “follow the leader” pattern that tends to happen with new jobs.

Pave doesn’t yet have a Forward Deployed Engineer role in our job catalog, but we will continually monitor and add it once there is a critical mass in the wild.

For now, and as a brief preview, Forward Deployed Engineers in Pave's dataset tend to be compensated:

• -9.2% relative to SWE Generalist
• +23.7% relative to Customer Support Engineering
• +16.2% relative to Technical Account Management
  

Practical Suggestions for Compensation & HR Leaders

This post reminds us to take a step back and ask “Is my company’s engineering team optimized for success today, particularly given the recent AI productivity enhancements (Cursor, Claude Code, etc)?”

It is likely prudent to perform a zero-based exercise as you think about the ongoing evolution of your engineering team.

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