Forward Deployed Engineer Skills and Job Description (September 2026)
Python is asked for by 41% of Forward Deployed Engineer employers, the most common requirement across 300 live postings read in September 2026. Then Software Engineering, TypeScript, LLM.
Median posted pay is $185,000, most postings between $156,408 and $220,000 — from 273 postings that disclosed it, across 75 companies.
Posted pay is down 2.6% since 2026-09-07 ($190,000 → $185,000).
These are ranges employers published in their own job postings — not salaries people typed into a form years ago.
What Forward Deployed Engineer postings actually ask for
Ranked by how many of the 300 posting descriptions mention them.
Python41%
Software Engineering26%
TypeScript25%
LLM23%
AWS22%
SQL20%
Azure17%
Kubernetes17%
CI/CD15%
Java12%
GCP12%
Machine Learning12%
React11%
Docker10%
Agile9%
JavaScript9%
GitHub9%
Data Pipelines9%
Cloud Environments9%
Facing Engineering8%
Enterprise Applications8%
Information Systems8%
Terraform8%
Data Engineering8%
API8%
Would your background clear the bar?
These are the requirements Forward Deployed Engineer postings list. Paste one of those postings and your résumé — FitToHire checks you against every requirement and shows the evidence behind each verdict.
15 companies in this sample have Forward Deployed Engineer postings open right now.
Each bar is a pay band. Height is how many of the 75 employers who published a salary fall in it, counted once each.
Pay bands in numbers
Employer median pay by band
Pay band
Employers
$102,300–$118,270
10
$118,270–$134,240
3
$134,240–$150,210
3
$150,210–$166,180
9
$166,180–$182,150
10
$182,150–$198,120
11
$198,120–$214,090
7
$214,090–$230,060
9
$230,060–$246,030
9
$246,030–$262,000
4
Total
75
Remote vs onsite pay
Median of remote-eligible postings against the rest.
Remote-eligible
$185,000
Onsite
$201,850
50 remote-eligible postings against 223 onsite. Onsite pays 8.3% more in this sample.
Pay by experience level
Level is taken from the posting title, so only postings that state one are counted.
Senior
$213,00044
Lead / Manager
$201,850160
Principal / Staff
$226,52522
Pay by location
Metros with at least three salaried postings.
New York, NY
$213,00021
San Francisco, CA
$220,00019
Chicago, IL
$201,85015
Seattle, WA
$207,4258
Remote, US
$168,1008
Denver, CO
$180,0008
Mountain View, CA
$220,5258
Los Angeles, CA
$201,2506
US
$187,5006
Austin, TX
$216,5256
Atlanta, GA
$231,2005
Boston, MA
$201,8505
Where this data comes from
300 live postings analysed
273 (91%) published a salary range
60 (20%) were remote-eligible
92 distinct employers
Requirements read from 300 full posting descriptions
Each employer gets one vote in the median, so a company running a large hiring campaign cannot move it
Ranges are converted to annual figures; hourly and contract postings are normalised before comparison
How the requirements were read
Requirements are not keyword counts. Each posting is read by our extraction engine, which works out what the employer is actually asking for and separates a requirement from a section heading or a line of boilerplate. Two postings asking for the same thing in different words are counted once, because our skills graph knows which phrasings mean the same thing and which imply others.
The share beside each requirement is the percentage of distinct EMPLOYERS in that sample who asked for it, counted one vote per company so a firm posting the same role many times cannot inflate its own requirements. Measured, not estimated, and read from the posting text rather than counted as keywords.
Because every reading is dated, the movement figures above are real month-over-month change. Sites built on self-reported salaries cannot produce that number: their data has no posting date.