25 vetted Operator-shaped roles + one editorial — every Monday, free.
Forward Deployed Engineer · AI Automation Engineer · Applied AI Engineer · Agent Operations.
Same work. Different titles. One newsletter.
25 verified roles · founding posts free · no VC
// Section 02 — Definition
On April 20, on the 20VC podcast, Aaron Levie predicted 500K to 1M new jobs for "agent operators" — the people who deploy AI inside marketing, legal, and ops teams.
Three days later, working contractors confirmed they're already doing it. Companies are paying $200K–$320K for senior roles under titles like Forward Deployed Engineer and Applied AI Engineer. The work is the same. The title is in flux.
The Operator covers the work, not the label.
Read the full breakdown →// Section 03 — Title war
After reading 50+ open job postings this week, the same role appears under at least seven names — sometimes at the same company. Compensation is real across all of them.
| Title | Where it shows up | Comp signal |
|---|---|---|
| Forward Deployed Engineer | OpenAI, Anthropic, Stripe, Palantir, Databricks, Modal, Cursor, Sierra | $200K – $390K |
| Applied AI Engineer | Anthropic, Ramp, OpenAI, WorkOS, NVIDIA, LangChain | $155K – $385K |
| AI Agent Engineer | Sierra, Hebbia, Modal, Relevance AI, Mercor | $230K – $390K |
| AI Automation Engineer | OpenAI (internal), Vercel, mid-market SaaS | $120K – $490K |
| Agent DX Engineer | WorkOS, Modal | $175K – $275K |
| AI Solutions Architect | Stripe (post-sales flavored), enterprise integrators | $ varies |
| Integrations / AI Workflow Engineer | Hebbia, vertical AI cos | $ varies |
// Section 04 — This week
Embed with customers to deploy Claude — write skills, MCP servers, and evals against their data.
Ships production GPT deployments inside customer environments — pick the model, wire it into their tools, own the outcome.
Builds customer-facing agent infrastructure at the Bret Taylor / Clay Bavor agent co — model selection, tool-wiring, production ownership.
Builds the agent features Ramp ships to customers — tool-use, evals, production agent loops. Highest comp band in the bucket.
Deploys Perplexity Enterprise Pro inside Fortune-500s — custom connectors, skill-definition, eval.
Core agent-platform engineering — orchestration, skills, tool-use runtime.
Internal FDE — deploys AI into Ramp's own workflows (finance ops, customer success), owns outcomes end-to-end.
Explicitly "Agent DX" — builds the developer surface for agents running on Modal. Rare title.
Deploys Cursor into enterprise dev orgs — integrates with their codebases, CI, internal tools.
Top-end compensation for "AI Automation" — internal Operator role running OpenAI's finance automation.
15 more roles in this week's issue. Subscribe to receive Monday →
// Section 05 — What you get
A short brief with 20–30 verified roles, one editorial, and one signal worth your time. No filler. No sponsored placements.
Salary ranges. Location splits. Title trends. We track which titles are winning volume and which are losing it.
Monthly interviews with working Operators — what they actually do, how they got hired, what they wish they'd known.
// Section 06 — For employers
Founding-period job posts are free through May 31. After that, $299/role. Listings reach 1,000+ Operators across Forward Deployed, Applied AI, and Automation tracks. Posted Mondays, archived as SEO-indexed pages forever.
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