> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt. # Founding Forward Deployed Engineer Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/085ae49f7e30a27e Sylvan Labs posts a FDE role to build what the customer runs in New York, NY, at $180,000–$250,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. Own end-to-end customer deployments, from messy warehouse discovery and business-concept mapping through agent workflows and proof of customer impact. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [Sylvan Labs](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/sylvan-labs) Posted Sep 10, 2026 by Sylvan Labs · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026 **$180,000–$250,000** + equity New York, NY On-site Full-time Own end-to-end customer deployments, from messy warehouse discovery and business-concept mapping through agent workflows and proof of customer impact. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F085ae49f7e30a27e&placement=top) - [View posting at Sylvan Labs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sylvan-labs/2621b304-05ce-4a11-a5ef-3c209b1571e3/application) Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so. ## At a glance ### Posted base pay $180K–$250K Above the median Midpoint $215K · median $190K This job $180K to $250K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K. ### The work Builds what the customer runs Balance **Mostly building** Project stages 1. Pre-sales (not covered) 2. Proof of concept (not covered) 3. Implementation 4. Operations - **Coding**: Writes production code - **Builds for**: External customers - **Level**: Senior - **Role**: Individual contributor ### What they ask for Experience - **3+ years** technical, customer-facing role Background - **Solutions and customer engineering** ### Do you meet what the posting states? The posting asks for 3+ years. How many do you have? The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now? The job is in New York, NY. Could you work there? Which of these have you used in production? Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent. [What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths) ## Conditions - **Location**: New York, NY - **Work arrangement**: On-site - **Employment type**: Full-time - **Pay**: ## More like this [Materialize](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/materialize) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ebeaed3047349cbb) New York, NY Hybrid 5w ago $180,000–$225,000 [Joyful Health](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/joyful-health) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/22795913cd1c6605) New York, NY Hybrid New · 4d ago $150,000–$275,000 [Distyl AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/distyl-ai) ### [AI Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/2625d8a6aa23c2b2) San Francisco, CA · New York, NY Hybrid 4mo ago $180,000–$250,000 ## The job description from Sylvan Labs Posted by Sylvan Labs on Sep 10, 2026 ### About Sylvan Sylvan is building autonomous revenue teams. We help B2B companies grow and protect revenue from their existing customers by identifying revenue-driving signals and deploying agents that act on them at the exact moment, across every account. We work with customers ranging from fast-growth startups to Fortune 500 enterprises like ServiceNow. Our ambition is to power the top-line of the economy. We are guided by a core principle: no assholes, high mutual respect. We operate at high intensity, but with deep respect. Direct, honest, and no egos — just a shared obsession to win. We’ve raised $10M+ from world-class investors and strategics including TQ Ventures and HubSpot Ventures. We are a fully in-office company based in New York City. **We will only hire A-players and are highly willing to go above-market in ownership, equity, and cash compensation.** We want world-class builders who are excited by the opportunity to be part of a category-defining company at the earliest stage. It won’t be easy. We’re going to move fast. But, it’ll be fun. ### The Role You own a customer from initial data access through a working, trusted system: understanding their business objectives, constructing the context layer our agents run on, building and deploying the workflows, enhancing the agent harness as you learn what breaks, and then proving the whole thing delivers customer outcomes. The hardest part up front is the data. Every warehouse is a mess in its own way: tables nobody documented, three competing definitions of ARR, and a data team with an hour a week to give you. Until that resolves into something clean and usable, nothing built on top is trustworthy. ### What You’ll Do - Understand what the customer’s business objectives. Sit with the customer's revenue and ops leaders, get to the goals behind the request, and decide what is worth building against. - Onboard new customers end to end. Scope data access, explore the warehouse with no documentation, and map a chaotic schema onto real business concepts. - Stand up the ontology and verify the mapping. Interview the customer's data team and business owners, resolve their own inconsistent definitions, and validate the mapping before anything gets built on top of it. - Build the signals and workflows on top of it. The predictions and actions the customer actually sees, and the agent harness behind them. When a step produces bad output for one customer, you diagnose it and improve it. - Own the value case. Agree the success measure with the customer up front, then build the case that we delivered against it: the analysis, the evidence, the technical substance behind a story we can point to. You’re honest when the number didn't move, and specific about why. - Make the next deployment faster. Validation frameworks, eval harnesses, reusable mapping tools — what you learn at one customer ships as tooling rather than tribal knowledge. ### What You’ll Bring - You work at the frontier of agent-driven development. You've built your own setup rather than living on the defaults, and you keep finding ways to get more out of agents than they give most people. - 3+ years in a technical, customer-facing role (forward deployed, solutions, or software engineering with heavy customer exposure); former founders strongly encouraged - Deep data warehouse fluency. SQL, dbt, and real comfort in an undocumented five-year-old schema with nobody left to ask. - You can sit with a customer's data or ops team, extract what a business concept actually means to them, resolve the cases where their own people disagree, and encode it. - Applied data science literacy. Distributions, seasonality, validation design, calibration. You know when a result is noise. - Painstaking through to the artifact. You'll chase a broken join for three hours because a number looked slightly off, and you'll care as much about whether the customer can actually interpret the output. Correct data in an unreadable form isn't delivered. - You define success metrics rather than report on them, and you can build the case that the work delivered. You can also tell a customer their number didn't move and why. - You hold a technical position under pushback from a customer or from us, and change your mind for evidence rather than authority. - High tolerance for ambiguity and unglamorous work. Based in NYC, excited to be in-office. ### Equal Opportunity Sylvan is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic under applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities throughout the hiring process - please let us know if you need any. [View posting at Sylvan Labs](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sylvan-labs/2621b304-05ce-4a11-a5ef-3c209b1571e3/application) ## About Sylvan Labs Sylvan builds an agent platform that helps B2B companies identify and act on revenue expansion and churn signals across existing accounts. 10–50 people ## Similar jobs [Roboflow](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/roboflow) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/d8c0abf8214d490b) New York, NY · San Francisco, CA Remote 5mo ago $180,000–$250,000 [Kaizen](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/kaizen) ### [Software Engineer, Cleared (TS/SCI)](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/09a07caf56c1198d) New York, NY Hybrid 7w ago $180,000–$250,000 [Justworks](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/justworks) ### [Senior Software Engineer, Solutions Engineering](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/706116a8d38052da) New York, NY Hybrid 3w ago $188,000–$242,000 [Dyania Health](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/dyania-health) ### [Forward Deployed Engineering](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/b4da555c0bda03f8) Jersey City, NJ Hybrid 4w ago $160,000–$225,000 [Google](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/google) ### [Senior Forward Deployed Engineer, Google Labs](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/4d1c7448b8630fd7) Mountain View, CA · New York, NY 11d ago $174,000–$252,000 - [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior) - [Similar jobs in New York metro](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?region=nyc-metro) - [Similar jobs that build what the customer runs](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?role=builds-for-customers) Hiring at Sylvan Labs and want this page changed or removed? Email info@nextmove.md and we take it down. Employer postings · [How we read postings](https://nextmove.md/fde/method)