The hottest job in finance right now is the Forward Deployed Financier (FDF) for AI companies

The hottest job in finance right now is the Forward Deployed Financier (FDF) for AI companies. Anthropic recently posted one at $425K base + equity.

Building the AI future (chips, robots, fusion reactors) takes a lot of capital. FDFs fill 3 big gaps:

• Traditional banks and credit funds don't understand important new asset classes, so they struggle to underwrite them. A heterogeneous deployment or a robot fleet is very different from real estate.
• Related but different, finance folks don't understand the technical fundamentals of hardware and AI. Few bankers can explain why prefill and decode might run cheaper on different chips.
• Important companies in this space (inference labs, neoclouds, hardware) are extremely technical but don't understand finance. Asset-backed lending, receivables financing, and prepayment financing could fund their growth more cheaply than equity, but most of them don't know how to think about these options.

A forward deployed financier bridges these gaps:

• Work inside the company alongside engineers.
• Understand the hardware as well as the cash flows, so they can explain it to lenders.
• Structure financing that fits the assets.

I have been speaking to people in this space and there just aren't enough FDFs yet.

If you are building hard things and struggling with finance, or you work in finance and want to work as an FDF in tech, ping me a message as I would love to chat.