Forward Deployed Engineer
Scaled Cognition
Mountain View, CA · Posted January 29, 2026
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Where Mountain View, CA ranks
Where Mountain View, CA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Best cities for AI-skill jobs45% · of 100
- #1Best cities for AI-skill jobs in the West Coast45% · of 71
- #1Best cities for mid-career professionals in the West Coast68% · of 71
- #1Best all-round cities for mid-career professionals in the West Coast85 / 100 · of 39
- #1Best all-round cities for AI careers in the West Coast96 / 100 · of 39
- #2Best cities for finance pay after cost of living$161k · of 35
Rankings about engineering jobs
- Best cities for software and engineering jobs #1 San Francisco (3,412 openings)
- Best cities for engineering pay after cost of living #1 San Mateo ($216k)
- Most requested AI skills in engineering jobs #1 AI tools in daily work (6.1%)
- AI tools named most often in engineering jobs #1 Claude (1.7%)
- Employers with the most engineering jobs #1 Amazon (2,992 roles)
Pay compared with the market
This listing does not state pay. Across 137 open forward deployed engineer listings that state pay, the middle half runs $155,000 to $237,500 and the median is $195,000.
Listed pay is what employers advertise, not what people are paid.
Forward Deployed Engineer salaries by state · Check your own pay
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among software developers, AI is already used for some of the tasks. Measured exposure for software developers: 29% (some).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Skills this job asks for
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About the job
Scaled Cognition is the world’s only model lab dedicated exclusively to customer experience and pioneering agentic models purpose-built for reliable action-taking enterprise applications. Backed by Khosla Ventures, the company’s flagship Agentic Pretrained Transformer (APT) eliminates hallucinations, enforces enterprise policies and increases reliability in real-world CX workflows. Founded by serial AI entrepreneurs, former Microsoft Corporate Vice President of Conversational AI Dan Roth, and UC Berkeley AI Professor Dan Klein, and built by a team of world-class PhD researchers and engineers, Scaled Cognition advances the science of agentic AI to deliver safe, policy-aligned automation that enterprises can trust.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you'll have significant autonomy to build, test, and deploy AI agents that solve real problems across industries. You'll work directly with customers to understand their challenges, collaborate with our research team to push the boundaries of what's possible, and partner with product and engineering to ship solutions that work.
This isn't about prompt engineering or wrapping existing LLMs. You'll be working with a novel model architecture that reasons deterministically—building the future of reliable AI agents from the ground up.
As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Scaled Cognition you will:
- Design and build AI agents for customers across finance, healthcare, legal, operations, and more—tailored to their specific domain requirements
- Work with the research team to expand our models' reasoning capabilities and add new domains of expertise
- Partner directly with customers to iterate on implementations, gathering feedback that shapes our platform roadmap
- Build robust evaluation frameworks to rigorously test agent performance and reliability across edge cases
- Create reusable patterns and tools that make it easier to deploy agents in new domains
Example projects could include:
- A multilingual banking support agent that handles account inquiries, financial transactions, and compliance workflows across 12+ languages
- A retail agent that manages complex product customization requests, inventory checks, and order modifications in real-time
- A telecommunications agent that diagnoses hardware issues, walks customers through troubleshooting steps, and escalates to technicians when needed
You might be the right person for the job if you:
- Love working directly with customers and translating their needs into technical solutions
- Are excited about building agentic systems and exploring what's possible at the frontier of AI capabilities
- Thrive in ambiguous environments where you have the autonomy to define the path forward
Key Qualifications:
- Have 3+ years of experience as a software engineer, with a track record of shipping production systems
- Strong Python skills and familiarity with modern AI agent development
- Previous experience in a customer-facing technical role (solutions engineer, forward deployed engineer, etc.)