Forward Deployed AI Engineer — Legal & Compliance

Alfie; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 185,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to build and deploy AI systems for legal work. You will embed with senior legal practitioners to identify first use cases and rapidly prototype value. This role is based in San Francisco or New York City with a three-day in-office hybrid schedule and relocation assistance.

Travel up to 50% may be required. You will own the technical work from discovery through production adoption, turning deployments into repeatable

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering, ML engineering, or technical deployment with customer-facing ownership.
• Experience with legal technology, legal services, compliance-heavy workflows is helpful but not required.
• Owned complex AI or data-driven systems end-to-end in high-stakes environments.
• Deployed systems powered by LLMs or generative models and understood model behavior and guardrails.
• Communicate clearly across engineering, product, risk, compliance, and executive stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Embed with law firms and legal teams to understand workflows, identify high-value opportunities, and select the right initial use cases to prove value.
• Build full-stack systems that deliver customer value and sharpen how we learn
• Embed closely with customer teams, understand their needs, and guide adoption of what you build
• Make trade-offs between scope, speed, and quality; adjust plans to protect delivery
• Contribute directly in the code when progress or clarity depends on it
• Codify working patterns into tools, playbooks, or building blocks that others can use
• Share field feedback that helps Research and Product understand where the models succeed and where they can improve

Skills

Customer-facing ownership

LLMs

Full-stack development

AI deployment

Job description

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer to build and deploy AI systems for legal work. You will embed with senior legal practitioners to identify first use cases and rapidly prototype value. This role is based in San Francisco or New York City with a three-day in-office hybrid schedule and relocation assistance.

Travel up to 50% may be required. You will own the technical work from discovery through production adoption, turning deployments into repeatable