Module 07 · 12 min · the centrepiece

Company Evaluator

Fifteen employers, scored on seven dimensions, so you can see which “FDE” jobs are the real thing. Then a tool that scores a posting you are looking at.

⚠️ Read the disclaimer, it matters

These scores are editorial assessments derived from public job postings and company statements as at August 2026. They are not company-published figures, and no company has endorsed them. The full methodology is written down precisely so you can disagree with it precisely. Where a base band is estimated rather than officially disclosed, the company card says so.

The instrument

Seven dimensions

The first four combine into a Substance Score out of 100 — “is this actually forward deployed engineering?”. The last three are reported separately, because compensation, accessibility and liveability are your trade-offs to make, not measures of the role's integrity.

Compare

The matrix

Sort any column. Filter by archetype, region, entry-friendliness or travel ceiling. Click a company name to pull it into the comparison below.

All dimension scores are 0–5. Substance is the weighted composite of Code (30%), Feedback (25%), Scope (25%) and Engineering bar (20%).

Head to head

Compare up to three

The shapes are the point. A large balanced shape is a mature FDE function. A shape that collapses on Feedback is a services operation. A shape that collapses on Entry is a great job you currently can't get.

Dimension comparison

Six build-and-life dimensions, 0–5

Moderate Editorial scores. Compensation is excluded from the radar because it is not a measure of role substance.

The uncomfortable chart

Paying well and being a real FDE job are different things

Compensation on the horizontal, substance on the vertical. The interesting quadrant is bottom-right: well-paid roles where the operating model is services. Those are perfectly good jobs — just not the job the title advertises.

Compensation vs. substance

15 employers · hover any point for the caveat

Moderate Compensation is a normalised 0–5 band score, not a dollar figure — the underlying bands span five currencies and cannot be meaningfully converted.

Patterns

Six employer archetypes

Individual companies change. These patterns don't — knowing the archetype tells you most of what the job will feel like before you read a single posting.

Archetype	Dominant success metric	Technical centre of gravity	Principal risk
Frontier AI lab	Model adoption, workflow impact, feedback to research	Agents, evals, model behaviour, platform APIs	Building one-off wrappers around rapidly changing models
Data / platform company	Platform adoption, migration and expansion	Data pipelines, cloud, integrations, applications	Becoming implementation support
Vertical AI startup	Customer outcome and product-market fit	Domain workflow plus full-stack AI	Excessive customer-specific branches
Robotics / industrial	Operational throughput, reliability, fleet scale	Edge, hardware, controls, site integration	Travel burden and physical-site incidents
Defence / public sector	Mission outcome, security and compliance	Secure cloud, data integration, auditability	Clearance constraints and long procurement cycles
Systems integrator	Delivery margin, programme success, follow-on work	Multi-vendor integration and change management	Diluting “FDE” into traditional consulting

🎯 The tool

Score My Offer

Have a real posting in front of you? Answer these five and find out what you're actually looking at. Nothing is transmitted anywhere — this runs entirely in your browser.

Check yourself