Deployment Lead, FDE - SF

Forward Deployed Engineering - San Francisco and New York City

About the team

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development.

About the Role

You will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers. You will own how they are built, shipped, and adopted. You’ll translate business outcomes into a technical plan, run day-to-day execution across FDEs, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, and partner with customer teams to ensure delivery supports their goals.

You will own delivery end-to-end: embedding with customers to map workflows and success criteria, ensuring components ship on time, and leading readiness and change management for adoption. You’ll track progress, manage dependencies, make sequencing decisions, and drive 0 1 prototypes through MVP and scale. You will also share field insights with Product and Research to guide roadmap and priorities.

Success will be measured first and foremost by impact - deployments that deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to their workflows. Additional measures of success include delivery reliability (milestones hit, low reopen/churn), operating leverage (patterns reused across deployments), judgment under pressure, and product impact (field signal that shifts roadmaps/architectures).

This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Success requires deep technical project management expertise, extreme ownership of outcomes, and an ability to immerse in customer workflows and partner with customer teams to solve complex engineering problems at pace.

This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. Travel up to 50% is required.

In this role, you will:

• Own the technical delivery plan for multiple interdependent work streams. Translate business objectives into a roadmap with milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria.
• Run day-to-day engineering execution. Track and drive delivery across OpenAI FDE and customer teams. Keep progress unblocked and sequenced. Make real-time trade-offs on scope and priority to protect the critical path.
• Embed with customer teams to land production deployments and drive adoption. Map workflows, shape tools/integrations, and translate requirements into a delivery plan. Lead onboarding, adoption, and change management.
• Partner with Product and Research so platform components and research work streams land in time to support deployment goals.
• Codify solution patterns and evals. Extract reusable patterns and package field signals to improve product and models.
• Own value cases and ROI. Set impact hypotheses, baselines, and KPIs; run pre-/post-deployment measurement and report to exec sponsors.
• Shape how we engage Financial Services customers

You’ll thrive in this role if you:

• Bring 7+ years of customer‑facing technical delivery leadership
• Track record of successfully leading large, complex, high-stakes customer engagements where customer outcomes depended on tight coordination and fast decision making, ideally involving AI.
• Excel in high ambiguity environments. Know how to simplify complex and dynamic work.
• Move fluidly between system level understanding and execution level detail; can dive into customer workflows/data, map constraints, sketch architectures and move ambiguous problems to shipped systems.
• Think strategically and pattern-match. Able to step back from execution detail, recognise broader trends across deployments, and connect customer needs to scalable, reusable solutions.
• Have strong technical fluency and sharp sequencing instincts. Confident discussing technical details, pressure-testing architectures, and making trade-offs.
• Have shipped AI/LLM systems. You understand solution patterns, integration basics, and production pitfalls.
• You’re a translator with executive presence. You make complex technical trade-offs legible to business leaders and convert strategy into day-to-day technical execution.
• Enjoy being onsite with customers to accelerate delivery (often 25-50%, sometimes higher).

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation

$230K – $294K + Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factorsance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.