587 FDE jobs just in NYC right now. Great write up here!
Forward-deployed engineer job postings grew 4x in 6 months while the overall AI Engineering market doubled.
I analyzed 113 FDE job descriptions to understand what companies actually want.
The results:
90% require direct client engagement
87% expect you to build production systems
62% need system integration work
51% want you to scope projects from scratch
The skill requirements are also broader than typical AI engineering positions.
I broke down:
- Which programming languages appear most (Python: 89%)
- The specific AI technologies companies ask for
- How FDE differs from solutions engineer, consultant, and AI engineer
- A self-assessment checklist to see if this role fits you
Full analysis with data and charts: aishippingblog.com/p/what-ai…
ALT Bar graph showing responsibilities of forward-deployed engineers, highlighting client engagement and system deployment as key tasks.
Granola just raised $125M at a $1.5B valuation from a two-person team in London (per CEO Chris Pedregal).
Yet every open role (9 of them) and every visible current hire in our data is US commercial — AEs, SDR, CS, RevOps, Finance.
Reads like: London builds the product, San Francisco is being built from scratch to sell it.
Wispr Flow has 61 open roles against ~73 people already on the team. That's essentially 1 new req for every person currently there.
New hires by year: 10 (2022) → 17 → 23 → 49 → 40 already in 2026 YTD.
They're not just hiring engineers — Head of Growth, Head of Talent, Head of PR, and a stack of AEs are open alongside Staff Platform Engineer and ML Scientist.
They are scaling on every front at once
Tech startups moving to NYC? SF is a talent dense environment but NYC is a people dense environment. All sorts. All types. Richer tapestry in the age of judgement and taste.
How many people building the future of AI spent their time in college thinking about Descartes, Nietzsche and Kant?
We found 133 current OpenAI and Anthropic employees with actual philosophy degrees.
The interesting part isn’t the number. It’s what they’re doing.
36% are in technical or research roles — engineers, research scientists, members of technical staff, data scientists.
There are plenty in policy, legal and GTM too. But nearly 50 philosophy grads are sitting in core technical and research roles at the two companies defining the AI era.
Next time someone asks, what do you do with that degree, let them know :)
The biggest feeder into Anduril engineering isn't Big Tech. It's Northrop Grumman, by nearly 3x over Google and Meta combined.
Where current Anduril engineers actually came from:
- Traditional defense / natsec: 322
- Big Tech (Google, Meta, Amazon, MSFT): 151
- Google + Meta direct: 37
Top feeder companies:
Northrop Grumman: 101
Amazon / AWS: 63
Lockheed Martin: 55
Microsoft: 44
SpaceX: 26
Boeing: 23
The real play isn't turning Big Tech into defense. It's giving legacy defense engineers a software-native place to build.
The most revealing comp signal at NYC startups right now isn't what they pay engineers. It's what they pay recruiters.
NYC recruiter market midpoint: $130k
NYC tech market midpoint: $200k
Recruiter vs Tech comp (midpoint):
- Stuut: $215k vs $200k (+65% over recruiter market)
- @Kalshi: $213k vs $185k (+64%)
- @AlchemyPlatform: $185k vs $190k (+42%)
- Tabs: $163k vs $200k (+25%)
When recruiter pay sits 25% to 65% above market while technical roles are flat or below, engineering talent isn't the constraint.
Recruiting throughput is.
Some of these startups are basically built on Palantir talent.
Valinor: 58 people, 19% ex-Palantir
Percepta: 69 people, 14.5% ex-Palantir
Foxtrot Services: 79 people, 12.7% ex-Palantir
Nominal: 251 people, 10% ex-Palantir
Valinor has 58 employees total. Eleven of them used to work at Palantir.
Of the 880 people who left Palantir in 2026, and joined a company under 1,000 people: 246 went to Engineering 115 became a founder or C-level exec. One in eight ex-Palantir startup joiners isn't joining. They're starting.
Berkeley is the only school in the top 5 at Anthropic, OpenAI, Palantir, Ramp, and Stripe. Stanford is top-5 everywhere except Ramp. Ramp's list is the outlier of the group: it's the only one led by Cornell/Waterloo/NYU/USC rather than Stanford/Berkeley/MIT, and Waterloo.
Cracking a fintech startup's top 5 is a real signal about where Ramp recruits vs. the labs.
Stripe's #2 slot, University of Washington (182, nearly tied with Berkeley), doesn't show up in anyone else's top 5, that could be a real recruiting pipeline (UW CS is strong) or one large historical cohort.
What schools feed into Stripe?
1. UC Berkeley
2. University of Washington
3. CMU
4. Stanford
5. Michigan
Where does Ramp like to hire from?
1. UC Berkeley
2. Cornell
3. University of Waterloo
4. NYU
5. USC