OpenAI’s Sydney job ad for a Forward Deployed Engineer asks the hire to own discovery, technical scoping, system design, build and production rollout, all alongside customers and with up to 50% travel. That’s a long way from the engineering roles most of us are used to hiring for.
OpenAI has company locally, too. Databricks is advertising a Senior FDE across Melbourne and Sydney, and Deloitte has the role open in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Canberra.
Demand has outrun supply
Globally, monthly FDE listings grew more than 800% between January and September 2025, according to Financial Times data. Recruiting marketplace Paraform puts growth in the candidate pool at about 50% over the same stretch, which goes a long way to explaining why these roles stay open for so long.
One title, three jobs
Bloomberry’s analysis of 1,000 postings found companies using the title for three different jobs: a builder shipping production code with customers, a rebranded solutions or sales engineer, and an implementation role. The clearest dividing line is custom code. If the work is mostly configuring a product or wiring up its API, that’s implementation.
The same dataset found customer work in 55% of postings and Python in 66%. None carried a sales quota, so pay belongs against your engineering bands.
The hard part is scoping
One enterprise data leader interviewed for an FDE hiring guide expected to lose about a third of engineers converted into the role, and the reason was the jump to designing in a business context. To me, that’s the most useful thing to screen for.
Where I’d start
If I were briefing an FDE hire, these are the three places I’d start.
- One of the three jobs, named in the brief. Saying which one you mean changes the quality of applicants quickly.
- A scoping exercise in the interview. A messy customer scenario, graded on the questions candidates ask before proposing anything, is the most telling exercise for this role.
- Full-stack engineers with customer curiosity. That’s where most strong FDEs come from.
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