> 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. # Forward Deployed Engineer Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ad782c7903fff57b Cursor (Anysphere) posts a FDE role to build what the customer runs in San Francisco, CA with no pay posted. Lead customer discovery and define use cases and success metrics. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [Cursor (Anysphere)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/cursor-anysphere) First seen Apr 22, 2026 · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026 Pay not posted San Francisco, CA On-site Full-time Lead customer discovery and define use cases and success metrics. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2Fad782c7903fff57b&placement=top) - [View posting at Cursor (Anysphere)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cursor/34cecd0c-c392-4454-8ef5-261310541011/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 Not posted 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 - **5+ years** software engineering, machine learning engineering, or data science - **2+ years** customer-facing role *Preferred* Background - **Software engineering** - **Solutions and customer engineering** - **Implementation and data engineering** ### Do you meet what the posting states? The posting asks for 5+ years. How many do you have? The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now? The job is in San Francisco, CA. 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**: San Francisco, CA - **Work arrangement**: On-site - **Employment type**: Full-time ## More like this [Hive](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/hive) ### [Forward Deployed Software Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/d280fa23305a2516) San Francisco, CA On-site 3w ago $120,000–$200,000 [OpenAI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai) ### [Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise - EDU](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/4b0baa0ee913def4) New York, NY · San Francisco, CA Remote Yesterday $251,000–$278,000 [Amazon (incl AWS)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/amazon-incl-aws) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer, AWS Forward Deployed Engineering](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/e4b5aa282dcdc7d7) East Palo Alto, CA · San Francisco, CA · +3 more 2d ago $143,700–$223,600 - [Other jobs at Cursor (Anysphere) (4)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/cursor-anysphere) ## The job description from Cursor (Anysphere) SpaceX was founded under the belief that a future where humanity is out exploring the stars is fundamentally more exciting than one where we are not. Today, SpaceX is actively developing the technologies to make this possible, with the ultimate goal of making life multiplanetary and expanding consciousness to the stars. SpaceXSI is building Super Intelligence to help humanity understand the universe. Our teams are building the full Super Intelligence stack: from our Colossus supercomputers, to Grok models, to our suite of applications, including Grok Bot, Grok Build, Grok Imagine, Grok Voice, and X. We're creating a powerful flywheel where more compute trains better models, better models power more useful products, and what we learn from people using those products shapes what we build next. ### About the role You embed directly with customer teams as the engineer on the ground: own an outcome, ship a production-grade SpaceXAI system that still runs after you leave, and become the critical technical feedback loop from the field back to product engineering. The work is the project. One week you might take a messy business workflow and put a production agent on it: pick the use case, stand up the architecture, wire it into the customer’s auth, data, and tools, then harden it with evals until the team actually uses it. Another week you might live in a customer’s repo and delivery system and ship an agent-powered path for a migration, a PR review loop, or an incident-to-fix flow, behind tests, review, and rollout rather than in a chat sidebar. Either way, you measure what matters, leave the customer able to operate it, and bring the pattern back as another use case for SpaceXAI. This is not a demo role. You own the work end to end, from the first discovery call through launch, iteration, and post-launch support, and you are responsible for systems that work in the real world. ### What you’ll do - Lead discovery with the customer: orient in their codebases and workflows, find the real bottleneck and the use case worth building, and define clear success metrics - Design and ship production agents, AI applications, and coding-agent workflows on Grok and our models, on live business processes and inside the customer’s engineering org - Get a first version live in days, then harden it over weeks with rollout, monitoring, and iteration from real usage - Own production quality: tracing, evals, debugging model or delivery failures, and latency and cost tradeoffs - Build the systems around the model (tools, MCP servers, retrieval, rules, skills, CI gates, and evals) and integrate them into the customer’s auth, data, workflow, and delivery systems; decide when prompting, architecture, data, process, or a model change is the right lever - Measure the outcome that matters (revenue, cost, hours saved, error rate, cycle time, escaped defects), not seat adoption - Work directly with Staff+, platform, and domain leaders, going deep in their systems while communicating clearly about tradeoffs and results - Leave the customer team able to run what you built, and turn what you learn into reusable patterns and improvements to SpaceXAI products ### You may be a fit if - You have 5+ years of experience in software engineering, machine learning engineering, or data science - You write and review production code (Python, JavaScript/TypeScript; other languages welcome) - You’ve owned a customer or operator outcome, not just a slide or a prototype, and can turn a fuzzy problem into a scoped, shipped system - You’ve built and owned AI-native workflows or agents in production, and debugged real production failures (model, tool, data, pipeline, or delivery path) - You’ve handled production reliability: metrics, alerts, safe rollouts, incident response - You build end to end: frontend, backend, infra, and prompt iteration - You thrive in ambiguity and don’t need a complete spec before you start building - You can talk to working engineers and to a VP ### Nice to have - 2+ years in a customer-facing role, leading discovery conversations and being accountable for outcomes for external stakeholders - Hands-on depth in several of: agents and tool-calling, eval harnesses, retrieval and context systems, CI/CD or developer platforms, and AI-native coding workflows in a real repo - Experience as a forward-deployed, solutions, or platform engineer embedded with customers, or as a founding engineer who owned an AI product end to end [View posting at Cursor (Anysphere)](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/cursor/34cecd0c-c392-4454-8ef5-261310541011/application) ## About Cursor (Anysphere) AI-native code editor (VS Code fork) plus autonomous coding agents, sold to individual devs and enterprise engineering teams. Acquired · 1000–2000 people ## Similar jobs [Petra Security](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/petra-security) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ac67d87a1e5c0c2c) San Francisco, CA On-site 1mo ago Pay not posted [EY](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/ey) ### [EY-Parthenon - Strategy and Execution - Growth Platforms - Software Engineer - Sr Assoc/Consultant](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/db242f263e15ea06) New York, NY · Atlanta, GA · +12 more Hybrid 2mo ago $130,000–$185,000 [Titan](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/titan) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/96694cce5cd5c7c7) San Francisco, CA · New York, NY On-site 3w ago $180,000–$480,000 [Salesforce](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/salesforce) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) — Agentforce Orchestration](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/aa41a1949bc5bc55) Atlanta, GA · Chicago, IL · +9 more 2mo ago $88,970–$316,750 [Cogent Security, Inc.](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/cogent-security-inc) ### [Forward Deployed Agent Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/8b2ffedbcbde8090) San Francisco, CA Hybrid 7w ago $100,000–$300,000 - [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior) - [Similar jobs in SF Bay Area](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?region=sf-bay-area) - [Similar jobs that build what the customer runs](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?role=builds-for-customers) Hiring at Cursor (Anysphere) and want this page changed or removed? 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