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From consulting to FDE

310 of 2,493 postings ask for consulting · 198 companies · 224 with pay · median $181,000 · middle half $160,000–$212,000 · read

  • Your strongest evidence is a client system that went live and stayed live, not the deck that won the engagement.
  • Employers reading a consulting resume look for what you built yourself, so name the code, the data model and the release you owned.
  • Say which parts of the delivery your team owned and which the client owned, because a reader cannot tell from a project name.
  • Ask whether the FDE role ends at a recommendation or carries a production system, because both exist under the same title.
  • Bring one example where the standard approach failed and you changed it with the client in the room.
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What a consulting record already proves

Consulting work gives you things FDE teams struggle to hire for:

  • entering an organisation you did not design and working out how it really runs
  • agreeing a scope with people whose incentives differ
  • working to a date with a client watching
  • explaining a technical trade-off to someone who will sign for it
  • handing something over so another team can run it

Those parts of forward deployed work have nothing to do with a language or a framework, and they are the parts that take longest to learn on the job.

The gap a hiring team reads for

A consulting title tells a reader nothing about who wrote the code. Two people with the same engagement on their record can be the person who designed the data model and the person who ran the steering meeting, and the posting is hiring one of them.

So make the boundary explicit for one project: the systems you touched, the code you wrote, the tests you ran, the release you were on the call for, and what you fixed afterwards. Where an offshore or client team built it, say so and say what you decided instead.

How to write the delivery story

Led a digital transformation for a global insurer.

That sentence survives a partner review and fails an engineering screen. Replace it with the work:

Mapped the claims workflow with the operations team, wrote the Python service that moved claims into the new system, ran the acceptance tests with the client's engineers, and supported the first month in production.

Keep the client's problem, the decision, the thing you built, and what happened after it shipped. Drop the engagement name and the methodology.

Five questions for the team

  • Does this role write the production code, or specify it for someone else?
  • Who owns the system after the client goes live?
  • How much of the year is spent on one account against many?
  • Is the output meant to become part of the product, or to stay with the client?
  • What does the team expect a consultant to be slowest at, and how do they support it?

Stated in the posting

267 of these 310 postings state a minimum number of years, most often 3–5 years.

Share of those 267.

  • 0–2 years34 postings · 12.7%
  • 3–5 years146 postings · 54.7%
  • 6–9 years65 postings · 24.3%
  • 10+ years22 postings · 8.2%

43 postings state no number.

Our reading of the posting

99 of these 310 postings plan what the customer deploys first.

  • Plans what the customer deploys first99 postings · 31.9%
  • Builds what the customer runs91 postings · 29.4%
  • Integrates and configures it80 postings · 25.8%
  • Builds for teams inside the company13 postings · 4.2%
  • Leads the deployment team11 postings · 3.5%
  • Proves it works before the sale10 postings · 3.2%
  • Keeps customers running after launch6 postings · 1.9%

Frequently asked questions

What do FDE and deployment jobs asking for consulting experience pay?

224 of 310 postings state a pay range. The median is $181,000, and half of them sit between $160,000 and $212,000, from 140 companies.

Which companies are hiring for FDE and deployment jobs asking for consulting experience?

These 310 postings come from 198 companies. The employers with the most postings are Deloitte US (12), Aircall (7), Amazon (incl AWS) (7), OpenAI (7) and Appian (6).

Are FDE and deployment jobs asking for consulting experience remote?

66 postings allow remote work from the US. Another 91 are hybrid and 67 are on-site. The remaining 86 say nothing about arrangement. Travel is mentioned in 150 of the 310 postings.

Employer postings · Counted over the postings that state what experience they want. A posting that states none, or that asks for experience outside the five we list, is in none of them. · How we read postings

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