Platform Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

Details

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) org sits at the intersection of product, engineering, research, and go-to-market. The FDE Platform team scales FDE’s impact on OpenAI’s platform and products by embedding with customer-tagged FDE pods to aid in architecting, product shaping, refactoring, and building. This team is for highly collaborative software engineers who enjoy innovating on cutting-edge products with other builders.

About the role

As the Engineering Manager for Platform FDE you will lead a small team that acts as a multiplier for the broader FDE org. Your mandate is to increase the rate at which customer-grounded ideas become durable, generalizable platform bets by providing hands-on product and engineering leverage to customer-tagged pods. You will partner with customer-tagged FDEs driving delivery and customer outcomes and embed Platform FDE capacity where it provides the highest leverage. In practice this means working in the trenches on architecture, product shaping, refactoring, hardening, and reusable abstractions while preserving the pod’s ownership of customer understanding and day-to-day execution.

This role requires engineering leadership and strong product-oriented judgment. You will manage a focused portfolio of platform incubation work with explicit hypotheses, success criteria, and measurable adoption outcomes, and be accountable for translating deployment signal into reusable capabilities for handoff. You will lead through influence across stakeholders, uphold a high technical bar, and establish clear responsibility boundaries between your team, customer pods, and partner organizations.

Location & work model

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

Responsibilities

• Guide a focused portfolio of platform bets: steer direction for a small number of high-signal problems with clear hypotheses, success criteria, sequencing, and measurable adoption outcomes.
• Build and validate with customers: ensure the team ships working software with design partners, instruments usage and outcomes, and iterates quickly based on real-world adoption and constraints.
• Co-develop with long-term owners: partner early with B2B Platform and other durable owners to align on architecture, interfaces, security/governance requirements, and handoff criteria; stay engaged through validation and the path to scale.
• Maintain a high engineering bar: set and enforce standards for design, code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness appropriate for enterprise use.
• Grow and develop the team: coach and develop engineers through direct feedback, clear expectations, and durable team mechanisms that reinforce execution and ownership.
• Operate with high judgment and influence: make tradeoffs under ambiguity, communicate decisions crisply across stakeholders, and drive outcomes through partnership rather than formal authority.

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience, including 2+ years managing high-performance engineers.
• Strong product-oriented judgment and customer obsession; ability to partner credibly with senior stakeholders while maintaining a high bar for delivery and technical rigor.
• Experience working in embedded/customer-facing engineering contexts and translating deployment signal into reusable platform capabilities.
• Demonstrated ability to set standards for architecture, code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness for enterprise use.
• Excellent cross-functional execution skills and the ability to lead through influence across engineering, product, research, and go-to-market teams.
• Experience coaching and developing engineering teams and building inclusive team mechanics (rotations, mentorship, scoped ownership).

Benefits

• Base salary in the listed range plus generous equity and potential performance-related bonuses.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave, paid medical and caregiver leave.
• Flexible paid time off and paid company holidays/office closures; paid sick or safe time per applicable 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 where eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees and other taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends).

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company focused on ensuring general-purpose AI benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety and diverse perspectives and is an equal opportunity employer. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law. Reasonable accommodations are provided to applicants with disabilities.