Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Financial Services - NYC

Details

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with banks, asset managers, insurers, and private capital firms to deploy production-grade AI systems in high-stakes financial environments. The team operates at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development, translating frontier model capabilities into reliable, auditable systems and repeatable solution patterns for regulated financial institutions.

The Forward Deployed Engineer will lead end-to-end deployments of OpenAI’s models inside financial services organizations where correctness, latency, explainability, and control matter. The role involves translating complex workflows, data constraints, and regulatory requirements into production systems, while working with Product, Research, GTM, Security, Legal, and GRC teams.

The role is based in New York City and follows a hybrid work model with three days per week in the office. Travel of up to 50% may be required.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship production AI systems around models, owning integrations, data flows, reliability, observability, and on-call readiness across financial workflows.
• Lead discovery and scoping from pre-sales through post-production, translating ambiguous business problems into hypothesis-driven problem framing, system requirements, and delivery plans with measurable outcomes.
• Define and enforce launch criteria for regulated financial environments, including controls, audit artifacts, evaluation benchmarks, and acceptance thresholds tied to risk and performance.
• Build in sensitive data environments where access controls, data lineage, explainability, and failure modes shape architecture and operating procedures.
• Run evaluation loops measuring model and system quality against workflow-specific financial benchmarks, including accuracy, latency, coverage, and false positives.
• Own delivery across multiple workstreams, balancing scope, speed, and quality to protect production outcomes.
• Distill deployment learnings into hardened primitives, reference architectures, playbooks, and tooling that scale across financial institutions.
• Surface field feedback that informs model behavior, product capabilities, and platform gaps in real-world financial use cases.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering, ML engineering, or technical deployment experience with customer-facing ownership in financial services or adjacent regulated industries.
• Experience owning complex AI or data-driven systems end-to-end, from scoping through production adoption, in environments where errors carry financial or regulatory consequences.
• Experience with financial workflows such as research, trading, risk, compliance, underwriting, operations, or investment processes.
• Ability to write and review production-grade code across backend and frontend systems using Python, JavaScript, or comparable stacks.
• Experience deploying systems powered by LLMs or generative models, with an understanding of model behavior, evaluation, and guardrails.
• Strong communication skills across engineering, product, risk, compliance, and executive stakeholders.
• Systems thinking and high execution standards, including the ability to turn incidents, escalations, and failures into improved operating standards and repeatable deployment patterns.
• Ability to remain calm and decisive when delivery is urgent, ambiguous, and high-stakes.

Benefits

• Base salary of $185,000–$300,000 per year.
• Equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by applicable law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.