FROM: A10X FIELD DESKTO: FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEERSRE: BRIEF №9 · THREE MOVESDATE: OCTOBER 2026 · WK 42
Two announcements in the last two weeks show who is hiring FDEs next. Atlassian, a software company most engineers already use, has 46 Forward Deployed Engineers and plans 100. Devoteam, a European consulting firm, plans to field over 300 this year and starts its first FDE certification cohort on 12 October. The third item answers the question engineers keep sending me: how much of this job is remote. On our board, 21 roles of 277. Three items, one theme: the employers are spreading out, and the work still happens where the customer is.
hiringAtlassian has 46 Forward Deployed Engineers and plans 100
What changed. On 2026-10-07 Atlassian published an interview with Paavany Jayanty, who leads its AI Forward Deployed Engineering team in the US. 46 FDEs today, "moving quickly towards 100 by the third quarter", deployed across the US, EMEA and India. Atlassian says they have worked with more than 100 enterprise customers and put 80+ AI agents into production. An engagement usually begins through an account executive or customer success manager, then "an FDE runs deep discovery, often via in-person workshop". At one financial institution the team went from uncertainty to a working agent in a secure sandbox in under three weeks. Jayanty draws the line herself: "We're not consultants."
Why it matters to an FDE. This is a software vendor, not an AI lab, building the role around products its customers already run: Confluence, Jira and its AI assistant Rovo. That widens the market. If you have spent years inside one enterprise product, the company that makes it may now want you at the customer's desk. India is named next to the US and EMEA. And the job starts with discovery in a room with the customer, before any code.
Pick the enterprise product you know best and check whether its vendor now has an FDE or deployed engineer team. Then practise the first hour of the job. A customer says they want "faster developer velocity". Write the five questions you would ask before building anything. If you want to be graded on that step, the free case is on a10x.dev/arena.marketA European consulting firm starts an FDE certification on 12 October
What changed. On 2026-09-30 Devoteam, a tech consulting firm working across EMEA with 11,000 specialists, announced it is accelerating its Forward Deployed Engineering practice. Its first certification cohort, 20 engineers, starts on 12 October 2026 under the name FDE Foundation by Devoteam. The programme covers "the full deployment cycle, from discovery inside the client's business units to solutions running in production." Devoteam says it is on track to field over 300 FDEs in 2026, backed by a five-year agreement with AWS to scale FDE work across EMEA, an FDE programme with Google Cloud to certify its engineers over the next 12 months, and selection as a Frontier Partner in Microsoft's FDE ecosystem.
Why it matters to an FDE. Last week's brief was a lab setting a bar. This one is a consulting firm building a bench, with all three big clouds behind it. For engineers in Europe and the Middle East that is a second kind of employer next to the AI companies: the consultancy that staffs FDEs on cloud partner work. Notice what the programme names first. Not a framework, not a model: discovery inside the client's business.
If you are in EMEA, add consulting firms to your search next to the AI companies. When you read any FDE posting, mark every line about the client (workshops, stakeholders, handover) and every line about the code. If the client lines outnumber the code lines, prepare the customer case before the coding round. The case kit on GitHub has three to practise on.hiring21 of 277 FDE roles are remote
What changed. On 2026-10-09 our live board listed 277 FDE openings at 85 companies. 21 are remote, 8%. 96 are in San Francisco or New York. 14 of the 21 remote roles are limited to the US or North America. Six remote employers publish a base range: Roboflow $180K to $250K, Alloy Identity (founding role) $141K to $250K, OpenHands $175K to $240K, RelationalAI $170K to $200K, Temporal $133K to $174K (2 roles), Defense Unicorns $123K to $167K.
Why it matters to an FDE. Forward deployed means you go where the customer is, and both announcements above say so: Atlassian starts with an in-person workshop, Devoteam embeds engineers inside the client's business units. If you need remote, the list is short and it will not grow fast. Treat each remote role as its own application, not one of fifty.
Open the live board, pick the Remote filter and read every remote role end to end. In every other loop, ask two questions separately: how many days at the office, and how many at the customer's site. For an FDE those are different numbers.The through-line
The FDE job is leaving the AI labs: a software vendor building around its own product, a consulting firm training engineers in cohorts. It is not leaving the customer's building. Wherever you apply, prepare the discovery hour first.
See you next Monday.
— THE A10X FIELD DESK
Sources: Atlassian: Meet the Forward Deployed Engineer (2026-10-07); Devoteam: Devoteam accelerates its Forward Deployed Engineering practice (2026-09-30); A10X live FDE job board, read 2026-10-09; Free 60-minute FDE case; FDE case kit (GitHub).