Technical Deployment Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)- Platform

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 130,000 - 160,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Job summary

OpenAI is looking for a Technical Deployment Lead to join the FDE Platform team in San Francisco or New York City. This role involves driving the success of design partner deployments from initial scoping to production adoption, requiring strong technical delivery skills and stakeholder alignment. The position offers a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and requires travel up to 50%. OpenAI fosters a commitment to equal opportunity for all employees.

Qualifications

• 5+ years leading complex technical delivery in high-ambiguity environments.
• Deep credibility with senior technical stakeholders.
• Strong background in enterprise security and governance.

Responsibilities

• Define pilot scope and success criteria with customer sponsors.
• Own the delivery plan across work streams.
• Drive stakeholder alignment and decision-making.

Skills

Customer-facing delivery

Enterprise security knowledge

Technical delivery leadership

Strong communication skills

Job description

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 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 escape criteria 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.

EEO Statement

OpenAI is 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. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via our accommodations program.