Who Is Hiring Forward Deployed Engineers — And What They Pay

Forward Deployed Engineers earn a median of $175,000 per year, with most postings between $143,850 and $219,500. From 321 job postings that disclosed pay, across 78 companies, August 2026.

Posted pay is down 2.6% since 2026-08-16 ($179,650 → $175,000).

These are ranges employers published in their own job postings — not salaries people typed into a form years ago.

Who is hiring Forward Deployed Engineers

15 companies with open postings in this sample.

Qualcomm
$264,800 5
Lightning AI
$237,500 3
Deloitte
$231,200 160
Microsoft
$223,500 11
Accellor
$212,500 6
Amazon Web Services
$196,300 3
Youtube
$189,500 8
Claryo
$172,500 6
Senra Systems
$165,000 4
Speechify
$152,500 23

Also hiring: Deloitte, Speechify, TRM Labs, Microsoft, Youtube, Accellor, Claryo, Cognizant, Qualcomm, Landline Company, Thoropass, Senra Systems.

Which of these would you get past?

Paste a Forward Deployed Engineer posting from any of these companies with your résumé. FitToHire scores you requirement by requirement and shows what is missing.

15 companies in this sample have Forward Deployed Engineer postings open right now.

Check your fit →

What Forward Deployed Engineer postings actually ask for

Ranked by how many of the 400 posting descriptions mention them.

Client Engagement 41%
Data Engineering 40%
Data Science 39%
Cloud Environments 37%
Data Modeling 36%
Enterprise Systems 36%
Feature Engineering 35%
Model Monitoring 34%
Model Evaluation 34%
Portfolio Management 34%
Prompt Management 34%
Project Portfolio Management 34%
Prompt Engineering 29%
AI Engineering 25%
ServiceNow Development 22%
Data Pipelines 22%
Agentic workflows 16%
Performance Optimization 15%

Forward Deployed Engineer vs adjacent roles

Roles people compare this one against, taken from what they search.

  • software engineer
  • solutions engineer
  • product manager
  • ai engineer
  • consultant
  • solutions architect

What Forward Deployed Engineers earn

10th $90K 25th $144K median $175K 75th $220K 90th $262K
$65K $288K

Each bar is a pay band; height is how many employers post in it.

Remote vs onsite pay

Median of remote-eligible postings against the rest.

Remote-eligible
$152,500
Onsite
$199,800

67 remote-eligible postings against 262 onsite. Onsite pays 23.7% more in this sample.

Pay by experience level

Level is taken from the posting title, so only postings that state one are counted.

Senior
$231,200 98
Lead / Manager
$298,300 78
Principal / Staff
$212,500 22

Pay by location

Metros with at least three salaried postings.

New York, NY
$199,800 31
San Francisco, CA
$199,900 20
Chicago, IL
$189,500 11
Redmond, WA
$223,500 11
Austin, TX
$206,150 8
Remote, US
$175,000 7
Charlotte, NC
$199,800 7
Seattle, WA
$231,200 7
Rosslyn, VA
$231,200 6
Denver, CO
$199,800 5
San Jose, CA
$199,800 5
Los Angeles, CA
$231,200 5

Where this data comes from

  • 400 live postings analysed
  • 321 (80%) published a salary range
  • 98 (24%) were remote-eligible
  • 120 distinct employers
  • Requirements read from 400 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