Deployment Lead, FDE - SF
$25k - $50k • San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 1h ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to transform research breakthroughs into production systems, operating at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development. In this high-trust, high-autonomy role, you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers, owning their build, shipment, and adoption. You will translate business outcomes into technical plans, manage day-to-day execution across engineering teams and customer stakeholders, and ensure delivery aligns with customer goals. Success is measured by the impact of deployments in delivering measurable value, driving adoption, and becoming critical to customer workflows, alongside delivery reliability and operating leverage.
Responsibilities
- Own the technical delivery plan for multiple work streams, translating business objectives into a roadmap with milestones and dependencies.
- Manage day-to-day engineering execution, tracking progress, unblocking teams, and making real-time trade-offs on scope and priority.
- Embed with customer teams to facilitate production deployments and drive adoption by mapping workflows, shaping tools, and leading change management.
- Partner with Product and Research teams to ensure platform components and research work streams support deployment goals.
- Codify solution patterns and extract reusable patterns from field signals to improve products and models.
- Own value cases and ROI by setting impact hypotheses, baselines, and KPIs, and reporting on pre-/post-deployment measurements.
- Shape how OpenAI engages with Financial Services customers.
Requirements
- 7+ years of customer-facing technical delivery leadership experience.
- Proven track record of leading large, complex, high-stakes customer engagements, ideally involving AI.
- Ability to excel in high ambiguity environments and simplify complex, dynamic work.
- Proficiency in moving between system-level understanding and execution-level detail, including mapping customer workflows and sketching architectures.
- Strategic thinking and pattern-matching skills to identify broader trends and connect customer needs to scalable solutions.
- Strong technical fluency and sharp sequencing instincts, with confidence in discussing technical details and making trade-offs.
- Experience shipping AI/LLM systems, understanding solution patterns, integration basics, and production pitfalls.
- Excellent communication skills with executive presence, able to translate complex technical trade-offs for business leaders.
- Willingness to be onsite with customers frequently (often 25-50%, sometimes higher).
Benefits
- Relocation assistance