AI’s Most Wanted Hire Gets a Big Raise

Good morning. For companies lost in the jungle of artificial intelligence and surrounded by pilots that never made it to production, the forward-deployed engineer carries a special cachet. Parachuted behind customer lines, these special operators are tasked with getting the AI up and running, then running at scale.

The FDE has recently gone from hired gun to the hottest hire in tech. Elite FDEs are now drawing between $586,000 and $1.45 million a year in total pay, according to new data from executive search firm Christian & Timbers, with equity and bonuses making up 52% to 66% of the package.

That’s money once reserved for top AI researchers. The firm defines “elite” as someone who has put agentic AI into production with at least $10 million in documented enterprise impact, can consult on strategy and has built and led an FDE team of their own. About 80% of them, unsurprisingly, did a tour at Palantir, which makes bespoke data management and analysis software for businesses and governments and is credited with making FDEs popular in recent years.

That has set off a three-way scramble among enterprises, tech companies and consulting firms for a very small pool of talent. OpenAI and Anthropic have each launched dedicated FDE services firms, Microsoft and Amazon are running their own programs, and Google and Accenture are training up to 1,000 FDEs together.

“Every company is thinking, ‘We got to do this ourselves,’” said Jeff Christian, founder and chief executive of Christian & Timbers. He expects demand to last at least through 2028.

Investors are eyeing closely today’s state races for what their outcomes will mean for data-center projects crucial to the AI build-out, the WSJ reports. Dozens of local referendums on data centers are on ballots, but outcomes from governor races in Georgia, Ohio and Texas will also have impact, the WSJ reports. A quarter of U.S. data-center capacity are projected to come online by 2030 in Texas.

Apple’s September-quarter revenue rose 12%, just beating Wall Street’s expectations as price increases helped offset soaring memory and storage costs, the WSJ reports. During its earnings call Apple also projected that for the current quarter its high-margin services business will continue to slow and gross profit margin will continue to fall. Shares declined as much as 4% after the company made the projections, which fell short of Wall Street estimates. One bright spot: The new iPhone Duo, with consumers snagging the $1,999 foldable smartphone despite mixed reviews.

Palantir reported third-quarter revenue up 96% to $2.31 billion, led by a 148% jump in U.S. commercial revenue, which for the first time exceeded U.S. government revenue, the WSJ reports. CEO Alex Karp in a note Monday credited the gains to businesses wanting more control over their AI use instead of relying on AI labs. Those same AI labs may also be a growing threat, the WSJ notes, with analysts saying some models can already do Palantir’s work of pulling scattered data together, drawing conclusions and supporting decisions for a fraction of the cost.

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