Used Tools & Technologies
Machine LearningRequired Skills & Competences
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value.
About proficiency levels:
- 1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;
- 3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;
- 7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;
- 10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.
Security @ 3
Scoping @ 3
Communication @ 6
Observability @ 3
AI @ 3
- 1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;
- 3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;
- 7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;
- 10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.
Details
OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) org sits at the intersection of product, engineering, research, and go-to-market. The FDE Platform team is a leverage function that scales the FDE org’s impact to OpenAI’s platform and products by embedding with customer-tagged FDE pods to aid in architecting, product shaping, refactoring, and building.
Platform Engineer is a role within FDE for software and ML engineers who want to build new platform capabilities from scratch, grounded in real customer deployments. You will partner with customer-tagged FDEs, embed with pods to provide high leverage in architecture, product shaping, refactoring, hardening, and reusable abstractions, and collaborate with the B2B Platform Team and long-term owners to decide what generalizes versus what remains customer-specific.
Location & Work Model
This role is based in San Francisco or New York. The team uses a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. This role does not require travel by default; travel is optional-by-project and typically <10% (with occasional spikes). OpenAI offers relocation assistance for eligible employees.
Responsibilities
- Provide hands-on leverage to customer pods: embed with customer-tagged FDE teams to support generalization, contributing directly in architecture, product shaping, refactoring, and implementation.
- Turn repeated signals into platform bets: translate cross-customer patterns into crisp hypotheses with clear success criteria, scope, and validation plans that fit real account constraints.
- Raise the engineering bar through tooling and mentorship: set org-wide quality norms through high-signal code review and pairing, and build lightweight developer tooling that encourages good architecture, readability, and correctness across FDE.
- Collaborate as part of cross-functional platform teams: partner with B2B Product, customer-tagged FDEs, ops, and business partners to bring platform capabilities to market.
- Lead complex platform capabilities end-to-end when needed: act as DRI for high-leverage primitives from requirements through implementation, make tradeoffs explicit, and involve customer pods early to keep work grounded in real deployments.
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, from scoping and hypothesis-setting through production adoption, and iterating using instrumentation, evaluations, and error analysis.
- Experience building or operating systems where reliability, security, and governance shaped design (permissions/RBAC, auditability, data access boundaries, rollout safety, observability, incident-driven hardening).
- Strong communication skills across engineering, product, go-to-market, and executive audiences; able to translate technical tradeoffs into adoption impact and measurable outcomes.
- Systems thinking: able to turn ambiguous feedback and failures into durable product requirements and reusable platform capabilities rather than one-off fixes.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company focused on ensuring that general-purpose AI benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety, inclusivity, and equal employment opportunity. Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law. Reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities are available.
Benefits
- Base salary in the listed range plus generous equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
- Pre-tax Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter accounts.
- 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 paid sick/safe time as required by law.
- 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 and other fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends).