Technical Deployment Lead - Tokyo
$25k - $50k • Remote • Tokyo, Japan • FullTime
Posted 5mo ago
Remote Work Policy
Fully remote
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
This is a founding role for a Technical Deployment Lead (TDL) based in Tokyo. The TDL will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers, owning their build, shipment, and adoption. This role involves translating business outcomes into technical plans, managing day-to-day execution across engineering teams, and partnering with customers to ensure delivery meets their goals. While not a management role, it requires end-to-end delivery ownership, including embedding with customers to map workflows, ensure timely component delivery, and lead readiness and change management for adoption. The TDL will track progress, manage dependencies, make sequencing decisions, and drive prototypes from inception to scale, while also sharing field insights with Product and Research to influence the roadmap. 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 interdependent workstreams, translating business objectives into a roadmap with milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria.
- Run day-to-day engineering execution, tracking and driving delivery across OpenAI and customer teams, ensuring progress is unblocked and sequenced.
- 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, mapping workflows, shaping tools/integrations, and translating requirements into a delivery plan.
- Lead onboarding, adoption, and change management for customer deployments.
- Partner with Product and Research to ensure platform components and research workstreams align with deployment goals.
- Codify solution patterns and evaluations, extracting reusable patterns and packaging field signals to improve products and models.
- Own value cases and ROI, setting impact hypotheses, baselines, and KPIs, and conducting pre-/post-deployment measurement and reporting to executive sponsors.
Requirements
- 7+ years of customer-facing technical delivery leadership experience.
- Proven track record of successfully 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 constraints and sketching architectures.
- Strategic thinking and pattern-matching abilities 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.
- Executive presence and ability to translate complex technical trade-offs for business leaders.
- Expertise in at least one major sector (e.g., healthcare, energy, financial services, semiconductors, IT).
- Fully bilingual in Japanese and English (spoken and written).
Benefits
- Relocation assistance
- Hybrid work model (3 days in office)