AI has created a new job with an annual salary of one million yuan. Platform data shows that over the past two years, the number of FDE (Forward Deployed Engineer) positions has surged 42-fold. On social media, many netizens have dubbed the FDE "the hottest job in the AI world."
On recruitment platforms, job postings from some large companies show that this role can command an annual salary of over one million yuan. What exactly does an FDE do? Can you really easily earn a million-yuan salary?
01 Hiring demand skyrockets, salaries reach a million yuan
FDE stands for Forward Deployed Engineer. Yasha (a pseudonym), who works in Los Angeles, USA, has eight years of product manager experience and later transitioned into software development. Two years ago, she became an FDE.
She told Jiemian News that two years ago, the role was still "extremely niche." "At the time, on LinkedIn, only the company I work for now and one other company were hiring for it."
She said the FDE role allows her to fully combine her product manager business experience with her technical skills as a programmer, without having to give up the accumulated experience of either side.
Nowadays, Yasha frequently receives messages from headhunters. With two years in the field, she is already considered a "very senior" FDE by headhunters. She revealed that headhunters are currently offering her an annual salary of $400,000 (about 2.71 million yuan) plus "fully remote" work arrangements to lure her into switching jobs.
According to a global labor market trends insight report released by LinkedIn in January 2026, over the past two years, companies have added at least 1.3 million AI-related positions, covering data annotators, AI engineers, and Forward Deployed Engineers. These jobs did not exist five years ago, yet they have now become an indispensable part of the digital economy. Among them, the number of new Forward Deployed Engineer positions grew 42-fold from 2023 to 2025, compared with a 13-fold increase for AI engineer positions.
Jiemian News found on platforms such as Liepin and BOSS Zhipin that companies including ByteDance and Ant Digital Technologies are recruiting for FDE positions.
ByteDance's job posting for "Doubao AI Large Model FDE" shows a salary range of 35,000 to 70,000 yuan per month, paid over 15 months a year, meaning a maximum of 1.05 million yuan. Ant Digital Technologies' B2B FDE position offers a monthly salary of 40,000 to 60,000 yuan, with 15 months' pay per year. Zhipu Huazhang's FDE lead position has a monthly salary range of 60,000 to 80,000 yuan.
Screenshot source: recruitment platforms
However, interviewed industry insiders believe that million-yuan salaries in China are concentrated among top-tier core talent and are not the industry average.
Lai Juncheng (a pseudonym), a post-90s professional working at an AI company in Shanghai, told Jiemian News that at his company, FDEs at lower job levels earn a monthly salary of 20,000 to 30,000 yuan, while higher-level FDEs are mainly paid annual packages, mostly starting above 400,000 yuan.
According to Yasha, FDE is not an entry-level position in the US. "Fresh graduates can't do this job — it generally requires several years of experience as a product manager or developer. So the starting salary isn't low either, around $200,000-plus in the first year. In Silicon Valley, there's no ceiling. I've heard of packages of $500,000 a year (about 3.38 million yuan), or even higher."
OpenAI's official job posting shows that its FDE role is responsible for working with the most important strategic customers, leading the complex end-to-end deployment of frontier models in production environments, with an annual salary of $162,000 to $280,000 (about 1.1 million to 1.9 million yuan) plus equity incentives, based in New York. In addition, Anthropic is also hiring FDEs, with an annual salary of $200,000 to $300,000 (about 1.36 million to 2.03 million yuan).
02 What does this job involve?
Lawted (a pseudonym), based in Shenzhen, was once a programmer at a major tech company. Not long ago, a logistics company approached him hoping he could use AI to optimize their business processes. He then transitioned into entrepreneurship and became an FDE.
"I found that their daily work was just repeating one task: a customer sends over a PDF, and they manually extract the tracking numbers and shipping addresses, then enter them into Excel," Lawted said. The company has 40 to 50 employees, 20 to 30 of whom are doing this kind of repetitive work.
He used AI programming tools to build a demo. A PDF that previously took a person several minutes to process was parsed by AI in seconds. He said that after seeing this efficiency gain, the logistics company signed a letter of intent with him.
Nowadays, Lawted's day basically goes like this: in the morning, he visits various companies to research whether their business processes are suitable for AI transformation; in the afternoon, he stays on-site to observe, seizing moments when staff take water breaks to ask questions; in the evening, he sorts through the day's requirements and does system development. "Before, I just sat in the office waiting for people to bring me requirements. Now I'm all over Shenzhen, looking for companies and bosses," he said.
Lai Juncheng, meanwhile, defines himself as the "general manager who handles everything except coding and administration" at a software development company. He has worked as an implementation engineer, sales engineer, product manager, and project manager, and has experienced the full journey of a product from template to final delivery. "This role happens to integrate the three stages of pre-sales, product, and project management," he said.
In Yasha's view, an FDE is a special kind of programmer. This role is not responsible for any specific functional module of the product; instead, it requires a comprehensive understanding of about 70% of the entire product, then using that understanding to engage with customers, deeply learn their workflows and data structures, and ultimately integrate the product with the customer so that it truly lands and gets used.
03 What are the barriers to entry?
"In the past, enterprise software was often a standardized product — however I built it is how you use it. But now, in the AI era, most products must be deeply embedded in the customer's business processes," Yasha said. At this point, you need someone who understands technology and can write code, going on-site (or online) to analyze with the customer: which requirements can be directly implemented, which need to be worked around, and which can be turned into win-win solutions.
Yasha said this means an FDE cannot be a product manager who only knows how to communicate and then relays things back to programmers — that's too inefficient and prone to distortion. "You must have technical depth yourself, be able to make judgments, and even solve some on-site problems with your own hands."
In her view, the most important qualities for an FDE are strong analytical skills and patience. "Every day you face ambiguous requirements, like a tangled ball of yarn. The customer is already anxious, and you need to calm down, untangle the threads one by one, guide them to articulate the real problem, and then push implementation forward step by step."
Lai Juncheng is currently also responsible for recruiting new FDEs for his company. When hiring, he values two things most: first, learning ability, and second, the ability to see the essence of things. As for educational requirements, he said that employees on his team who studied design or less common foreign languages have all performed excellently.
On recruitment platforms, taking the aforementioned Doubao job posting as an example, the requirements include a bachelor's degree or above, with preference for majors such as computer science, communications, and artificial intelligence; a solid programming foundation (Python/Java, etc.), the ability to independently complete code development and debugging, and full-stack development capability; familiarity with the technical principles of large models, mastery of methods for evaluating large model effectiveness and performance, and familiarity with various Post-Training techniques; and familiarity with API calls for large model-related products.
Regarding the prospects for FDEs, Lai Juncheng believes one can look to the trajectory of the "product manager" role when the mobile internet rose a decade ago. "It was hot for about five to ten years, then gradually cooled down. I think FDE will go through a similar process. But along the way, top 'super individuals' like Allen Zhang or Zhang Yiming will surely emerge, profoundly influencing our lives."
Yasha, on the other hand, values the role more as a stepping stone to entrepreneurship. "FDEs have seen so many success and failure cases and deeply understand user pain points and the details of project implementation. The barrier to starting a business in the AI era is getting lower and lower. If you have FDE experience, you'll know exactly what the market lacks and what product you should build."
Lawted, who had already received an admission offer from Harvard University, decided to temporarily focus on his entrepreneurial practice, first seizing the one-to-two-year window of opportunity for AI transformation of traditional enterprises. "Because AI moves too fast. It used to take one or two years and several million yuan to build an enterprise management system. Now, using AI programming, we can deliver a custom system in two months."
Yasha said she is currently very optimistic about the prospects of the FDE role. But she also knows that AI is evolving so fast that no one can accurately predict the future of any profession. "All we can do is see clearly the direction it's heading, and at the right moment, jump onto the next wave."
This article is from the WeChat public account "Jiemian News" (ID: jwview), author: Luo Kun, published by 36Kr with authorization.