State of
FDE Hiring 2026

What counts as an FDE role. An engineer who writes production code inside or for a specific customer's environment. Sales engineers, solutions architects without hands-on build work, support, project management and configuration-only roles don't count, whatever the title says. Our editor reviews every posting with Claude: Claude reads each one and makes the first call against our written rules, which the editor sets and tunes.

Window. Every posting that was live on an employer's board at any point between October 7 and October 28, 2026, including roles first posted earlier. We count postings, not openings: one posting can hire several people, and some employers post one role separately for each city (each city counts; an exact duplicate, same company, title and city, counts once).

Pay. Only pay from the employer's job board pay field or numbers written in the posting. We use the midpoint of the posted base range and leave out hourly, monthly and commission-only pay. Equity and bonus aren't included.

Labels. Travel, coding, quota, equity, seniority and skills come from a language model reading each posting, with samples checked against the posting text. Small shares (under 5%) carry the most error. 75 postings expired before we could read them; they count in the totals but not in any share that needs the posting text.

How we're likely wrong. We undercount employers without a public job board, employers on Workday and similar systems (which we only reach through Indeed, LinkedIn and Glassdoor, so large consultancies are underrepresented) and FDE work posted under unrelated titles. Our window is short, so we show no trends from our own data; growth figures come from Lightcast and Google. Employer types are our own classification.

Third-party data. Each chart names its source. We never combine providers in one chart, because they count differently.