Technical Deployment Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

Details

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team turns research breakthroughs into production-grade systems. The FDE team embeds deeply with customers to solve high-leverage problems, move quickly from prototype to production, and surface reusable patterns that shape the platform. FDE operates at the intersection of deployment and development, working closely with OpenAI Research, Product, and Partnerships.

About the role

As a Technical Deployment Lead (TDL), you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers. You will own how they are built, shipped, and adopted. You will 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 will 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 by impact — deployments that deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to customer workflows — as well as delivery reliability, operating leverage (reusable patterns), judgment under pressure, and product impact.

This role is based in New York City or San Francisco. The team uses a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is offered. Travel between 25%–50% is required.

Responsibilities

• 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, and 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, translate requirements into a delivery plan, and 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 evaluations: 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 executive sponsors.

Requirements

• 7+ years of customer-facing technical delivery leadership.
• Track record of leading large, complex, high-stakes customer engagements where outcomes depended on tight coordination and fast decision making, ideally involving AI.
• Ability to operate in high-ambiguity environments and simplify complex, dynamic work.
• Ability to move between system-level understanding and execution-level detail: dive into customer workflows and data, map constraints, sketch architectures, and move ambiguous problems to shipped systems.
• Strategic thinking and pattern recognition: recognize broader trends across deployments and connect customer needs to scalable, reusable solutions.
• Strong technical fluency and sequencing instincts; comfortable discussing technical details, pressure-testing architectures, and making trade-offs.
• Experience shipping AI/LLM systems and understanding solution patterns, integration basics, and production pitfalls.
• Executive presence and translation skills: make complex technical trade-offs legible to business leaders and convert strategy into day-to-day technical execution.
• Expertise in at least one major sector (e.g., healthcare, energy, financial services, semiconductors, IT) to elevate solution framing and credibility.

Benefits

• Base salary range: $198,000–$335,000 plus equity and performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees.
• 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.
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional paid coordinated company 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 taxable fringe benefits such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

Company

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