About the team
OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) org sits at the intersection of product, engineering, research, and go-to-market. We take frontier platform capabilities into the real world with design partners, turning raw customer signal into shipped software, repeatable patterns, and durable products.
The FDE Platform team is primarily a leverage function that scales the FDE org’s impact to OpenAI’s platform and products. We provide hands-on leverage by embedding with customer-tagged FDE pods to aid in architecting, product shaping, refactoring, and building. This team is perfect for highly collaborative software engineers who love innovating on cutting-edge products with other builders.
About the role
This is a founding Technical Deployment Lead (TDL) role for the FDE Platform team. You will be accountable for making our earliest design partner deployments successful, from initial scoping and success criteria through production adoption and demonstrated value.
This is an ops-heavy, technically deep role: you will drive alignment across OpenAI and customer stakeholders, run the delivery plan across interdependent workstreams, and ensure enterprise constraints are handled upfront rather than discovered late. You will work closely with B2B Platform and FDE Platform teams to drive crisp execution, clear tradeoffs, and a path to scalable rollout for our platform design partners. Success is defined by delivered outcomes and adoption in critical workflows, not activity or slideware.
Success will be measured by platform outcomes that are measured by successful deployments. Deployments should deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to their workflows. Additional measures of success include delivery reliability (milestones hit, low reopen/churn), operating leverage (patterns reused across deployments), judgment under pressure, and product impact (field signal that shifts roadmaps/architectures).
This role is based in San Francisco or New York City. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. Travel up to 50% is required.
In this role you will
Define pilot scope and success criteria: Partner with customer sponsors and technical leads to translate goals into a concrete plan, measurable outcomes, and clear acceptance criteria.
Own the delivery plan across work streams: Build and run integrated milestones, dependencies, and execution rhythms across Applied, platform engineers, and customer teams.
Drive stakeholder alignment and decision-making: Lead internal and external working sessions, keep tradeoffs explicit, unblock decisions, and escalate crisply when needed.
Ensure enterprise readiness from day one: Pressure-test security posture, permissions and access boundaries, audit-ability, and deployment/infra requirements as part of the delivery plan.
Manage production adoption and value realization: Drive onboarding, enablement, and change management so deployments land in real workflows and deliver measurable impact.
Run multiple deployments with rigor: Maintain clear status, risks, and mitigations across concurrent pilots, and continuously adjust plans to protect outcomes.
Convert learnings into actionable next steps: Synthesize what worked and what broke into clear requirements, sequencing proposals, and improvements to the platform delivery approach.
You might thrive in this role if you
Have 5+ years leading complex, customer-facing technical delivery where you owned outcomes end-to-end in high-ambiguity environments.
Are deeply credible with senior technical stakeholders and can whiteboard architectures, reason about enterprise deployment constraints, and go in the weeds when required.
Have strong instincts for enterprise security and governance, including permissions/RBAC, audit trails, data access boundaries, and rollout safety.
Bring an ops-first background (e.g., platform delivery leadership, technical program/delivery leadership, product/engineering operations) and a track record of driving execution through matrixed teams.
Communicate with executive presence: you can align sponsors, make tradeoffs legible, and keep teams focused on the critical path under pressure.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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