Solutions Architect Listings Just Got Passed by a Title That Barely Existed in 2024

In 2024, exactly 3 companies in our dataset posted a Forward Deployed Engineer role. Today, 241 do — and their 638 active FDE listings have overtaken the 534 active Solutions Architect listings across the 90,150 ATS-verified jobs Employbl tracks. The customer-facing technical role isn't shrinking. It's being renamed, and the new name usually comes with more scope.

I run Employbl, and if you came here researching Solutions Architect roles at software companies, the SA market data is right below — it's still a real, substantial market with a clear center of gravity. But you should also see the adjacent market that just passed it, because it hires for the same skill set you already have.

Scope, stated up front: these counts cover companies hiring through Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby — a startup- and scaleup-heavy slice of the market. Enterprise vendors that run their own career sites or post only on LinkedIn aren't in the index, and listing counts measure open reqs right now, not the size of anyone's SA or FDE org.

Which companies hire Solutions Architects in 2026?

There are 534 active Solutions Architect listings on our platform today. Six in ten of them sit in a single sector:

• Developer Tools & Infrastructure: 324 listings across 50 companies — 61% of the entire SA market
• Fintech: 51 listings across 24 companies
• AI & Machine Learning: 34 listings across 18 companies
• Cybersecurity: 27 listings across 16 companies
• Sales & Marketing Software: 19 listings
• Aerospace & Defense: 15 listings

The concentration is the finding here. If you're an SA, your buyer is overwhelmingly a developer-tools or infrastructure company — the places where the product is technical enough that selling it and deploying it both require an engineer's judgment. Fintech is a distant second at 51 listings. The classic adjacent titles are healthy too: 552 active Solutions Engineer listings and 426 active Sales Engineer listings sit alongside the SA market, and the skill overlap between all three is substantial.

The title that passed it: Forward Deployed Engineer

Here's the comparison that made me rewrite this post. Forward Deployed Engineer — a title that was essentially a Palantir-ism two years ago — now has 638 active listings across 241 companies. That's 104 more open roles than Solutions Architect, a title that's been standard for two decades.

The adoption curve is steeper than the raw count suggests:

• 2024: 3 companies posted FDE roles
• 2025: 41 companies
• First half of 2026: 88 more companies posted their first FDE role

• Today: 241 companies with 638 active FDE listings

I broke down who those companies are in our Forward Deployed Engineer analysis — the short version is that AI companies adopted the title first, and the rest of the market is following them.

Same skill set, new wrapper, more scope

Strip the titles and compare the jobs. A Solutions Architect designs the technical solution and guides the customer's team through implementing it. A Forward Deployed Engineer embeds with the customer and implements it themselves — the same customer-facing technical judgment, plus shipping code in production. The FDE wrapper usually carries more scope, and at AI companies it often carries the compensation profile of a product engineer rather than a pre-sales role.

That's why I'd frame FDE as the SA's adjacent market rather than a different career. If you can run a discovery call, design an integration, and hold credibility with a buyer and their engineers at the same time, you're a plausible candidate for a large share of those 638 listings — and that's the side of this market that's growing.

Three readings on why the title flipped

The overtake is a fact in our data. The cause isn't — here are the three hypotheses I'd weigh, and they point in different directions:

• (a) AI products genuinely need last-mile integration. Model-backed products don't deploy themselves; vendors are selling outcomes rather than licenses, and that requires an engineer embedded at the customer. If this is the driver, FDE roles carry real, durable scope.
• (b) Title arbitrage. "Engineer" recruits better than "sales engineer" and lands better with customers. Same req, better wrapper — if this dominates, the market is renaming itself, not expanding.
• (c) Plain rebrands. Some FDE listings are SE or SA reqs with a new label. The fact that Solutions Engineer (552) and Sales Engineer (426) counts remain substantial while FDE grew suggests the rebrand is partial rather than wholesale — new demand and renaming are both happening at once.

Which reading matters if you're an SA deciding whether to rebrand: under (a), the FDE title is a scope upgrade worth chasing on its merits. Under (b), it's your current job with better branding — take the branding. Under (c), it's a coin flip per listing, which is exactly why you vet the individual req — who it reports to, whether it ships production code — before you apply.

What this means if you're a Solutions Architect

• Search both titles. A "solutions architect" search shows you 534 roles and hides the 638 FDE roles next door — plus 552 Solutions Engineer and 426 Sales Engineer listings that overlap heavily with what you already do.
• Weight developer tools. With 324 of 534 SA listings at just 50 dev-tools and infrastructure companies, that's the sector where SA experience is priced highest — and 50 companies is a small enough list to research one by one.
• Vet FDE roles for what they really are. Some are genuine embedded-engineering roles with real scope; some are rebadged support. The company's funding, engineering culture, and who the role reports to tell you which — check before you apply.
• Start the FDE research with the three biggest hirers. Databricks has 90 active FDE listings, Palantir 68, and OpenAI 33 — that's an afternoon of company research covering 191 of the 638 open roles, and all three are companies where the title carries real engineering scope. One thing to know going in: only 3 of the 638 FDE listings post a salary range, so price the role through the company's funding stage and comparable engineering bands, not the listing.

Methodology

Numbers come from Employbl's live jobs dataset: 90,150 active, ATS-verified listings pulled from company career boards on Greenhouse, Lever, and Ashby as of July 16, 2026, across 25,000+ tracked companies. Title counts match active listings by title phrase (Solutions Architect, Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Sales Engineer), so variant titles containing those phrases are included. Sector groupings use Employbl's company industry tags; a company with multiple tags can appear in more than one sector. FDE adoption by year counts the first year each company posted an FDE listing in our data — companies that used the title before our coverage or on boards we don't track aren't counted, so the 2024 baseline is conservative.

Research the software companies hiring for these roles on Employbl — funding, tech stack, and team on every profile — and read the full FDE breakdown for the other half of this market.