Earlier this year I rebuilt the positions in my own company around the forward deployed engineer, so I read the reporting on why engineers avoid the role with some interest.
The Pragmatic Engineer, March 2026, citing the Wall Street Journal: job postings for the role up more than 10-fold in 2025 over 2024, mentions in public company transcripts from 8 to 50, and a recruiting executive's estimate that about 10% of the market wants the job. Two engineers who took it described sales engineering: deploy, integrate what the product team built, contribute nothing back. One quit after four weeks.
What I found when I defined the role for my own people was that the title is not the hard part. The hard part is the test. The engineer I want takes a real problem, not a ticket. They decide how to solve it, build it inside the client's codebase, and are still there when it breaks in production. Some very good developers did not want that. They wanted the spec.
The 10% who want this job are the ones who want to own the outcome. The companies posting the title should be describing that, and most of them are describing a demo.
Sources
- The Pragmatic Engineer, Is the FDE role becoming less desirable?, March 2026. https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/is-the-fde-role-becoming-less-desirable