The opportunity
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.
What you'll do
Guide a focused portfolio of platform bets: Steer direction for a small number of high-signal problems, with clear hypotheses, success criteria, sequencing, and measurable adoption outcomes.
Build and validate with customers: Ensure the team ships working software with design partners, instruments usage and outcomes, and iterates quickly based on real-world adoption and constraints.
Co-develop with long-term owners: Partner early with B2B Platform (and other durable owners) to align on architecture, interfaces, security/governance requirements, and handoff criteria, staying engaged through validation and the path to scale.
Maintain a high engineering bar: Set and enforce standards for design, code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness appropriate for enterprise use.
Grow and develop the team: Coach and develop engineers through direct feedback, clear expectations, and durable team mechanisms that reinforce execution and ownership.
Operate with high judgment and influence: Make clear tradeoffs under ambiguity, communicate decisions crisply across stakeholders, and drive outcomes through partnership rather than formal authority.
What they're looking for
- Bring 8+ years of engineering experience , including 2+ years managing high-performance engineers
- Are deeply customer-obsessed and can partner credibly with senior: stakeholders while keeping a high bar for delivery and technical rigor.
- Naturally act as a shepherd: you elevate and refine others’ ideas, sharpen hypotheses, and make disciplined “scale vs pause” calls with clear reasoning.
- Excel at cross-functional execution , forming tight partnerships with: engineering, product, research, and GTM teams to deliver outcomes without needing formal authority.
