HiringAWS put a billion dollars behind the FDE role, and postings are up over 1,000%
AWS announced a $1B investment to embed engineers directly inside enterprise customers, joining OpenAI and Anthropic in the same race. Postings for forward deployed engineer roles are up more than 1,000% year over year. Senior FDE total comp at the frontier labs is running $560,000 to $785,000, while Palantir's median forward deployed engineer sits near $215,000. Cursor's global forward deployment lead is publicly calling it the hottest job of 2026.
→ DO THIS WEEK: pull three live FDE postings (one frontier lab, one infra vendor, one vertical AI startup) and highlight every line that describes an outcome rather than a technology. Those lines are the interview. Then write one paragraph per posting on the last thing you shipped that maps to it. If you cannot fill all three, you just found your next project.EvidenceJohns Hopkins measured frontier agents on real enterprise work: 28% first pass, under 8% repeatable
Before deploying anything, Johns Hopkins Medicine benchmarked frontier agents in a simulated environment with 25 applications, 77 tools, and tasks grounded in thousands of pages of managed care policy. Leading frontier agents completed about 28% of complex tasks on the first attempt. Fewer than 8% stayed successful across repeated runs. The dominant failure mode was not hallucination and not integration. It was reasoning through policy-dense situations. And the same model, moved between two harnesses, went from workable to failing outright on an end-to-end prior authorization task.
→ DO THIS WEEK: take any agent you have built and run the same 10 tasks five times each. Report first-pass completion and repeat-consistency as two separate numbers. If you have never seen that second number for your own work, you have been grading yourself on the demo, which is exactly what your customer will stop doing in week two.