Platform Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering

Details

About the team

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) org sits at the intersection of product, engineering, research, and go-to-market. The team takes frontier platform capabilities into the real world with design partners, turning customer signal into shipped software, repeatable patterns, and product direction. This group is an innovation loop within FDE: sprinting on a small number of platform bets, validating with design partners, and transitioning successful capabilities to scalable ownership.

About the role

Platform Incubation Engineer is a role within Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) for strong software and ML engineers who want to build new platform capabilities from scratch, grounded in real customer deployments. You will join a small team working in pods against platform bets rather than a single long-running account. You'll collaborate closely with customer-tagged FDEs and partner teams across engineering and product to: (1) incubate early versions, (2) validate them with design partners through short deployments or pilots, and (3) drive adoption by making the capability durable, usable, and ready to scale. Expect to be customer-facing when it matters — pitching, rollout planning, debugging, and learning directly from what breaks in production — while primarily turning frontier signal into reusable platform capability.

This role does not require travel. It is based in San Francisco or New York. The team uses a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is offered. Travel is optional-by-project and typically <10%, with occasional spikes for key embeds or launches.

Responsibilities

• Architect and build new platform capabilities: turn frontier customer signal into concrete designs, implementations, and APIs that become part of the OpenAI platform.
• Incubate platform bets end-to-end: take ambiguous problems, form crisp hypotheses, ship initial capabilities, and iterate quickly based on production feedback.
• Embed with design partners to learn fast: run deep technical discovery, understand production constraints, and translate needs into product and platform requirements.
• Partner with customer-tagged FDEs in the field: deploy and debug together, capture repeatable patterns, and convert field learnings into platform improvements.
• Design and run pilot programs: define qualification criteria for early adopters, stand up alphas, and use pilots to harden the platform and rollout playbook.
• Collaborate with cross-functional platform teams: align on architecture and deliver production systems together with core product and engineering counterparts.
• Drive adoption outcomes: measure usage, identify blockers and failure modes, and prioritize platform increments that unlock repeatable value.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering or ML engineering experience, with a track record of shipping 0→1 capabilities that other engineers or customers depend on.
• Experience owning customer-adjacent technical work end-to-end: scoping, hypothesis-setting, production adoption, and improving outcomes through instrumentation, evaluation, and error analysis.
• Experience building or operating systems where reliability, security, and governance materially shaped design (permissions/RBAC, auditability, data access boundaries, rollout safety, observability, and incident-driven hardening).
• Strong communication skills across engineering, product, go-to-market, and executive audiences; ability to translate technical tradeoffs into adoption impact and measurable outcomes.
• Systems thinking: converting ambiguous feedback and failures into durable product requirements and reusable platform capabilities rather than one-off fixes.

Benefits

• Competitive base pay (range listed separately), generous equity, and potential performance-related bonuses.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts (Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, commuter expenses).
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave and paid medical/caregiver leave.
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees; up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional coordinated office closures.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend; daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.

Additional details

• Location: San Francisco or New York City (hybrid, 3 days in office per week).
• Travel: typically <10%, optional-by-project.
• Background checks and reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities are part of the hiring process.