Deployment Lead, FDE - SF

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development. You will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers, owning how they are built, shipped, and adopted. You will own delivery end-to-end, embedding with customers to map workflows and success criteria, ensuring components ship on time, and leading readiness and change management for adoption. Success is measured by impact, delivery reliability, operating leverage, judgment under pressure, and product impact. This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. This role is based in San Francisco, uses a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week, and requires travel up to 50%.

Responsibilities

Own the technical delivery plan for multiple interdependent work streams; Translate business objectives into a roadmap with milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria; Run day-to-day engineering execution across OpenAI FDE and customer teams; Keep progress unblocked and sequenced and 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; Map workflows, shape tools/integrations, and translate requirements into a delivery plan; Lead onboarding, adoption, and change management; Partner with Product and Research so platform components and research work streams land in time to support deployment goals; Codify solution patterns and evals and extract reusable patterns; Own value cases and ROI, set impact hypotheses, baselines, and KPIs, run pre-/post-deployment measurement, and report to exec sponsors; Shape how we engage Financial Services customers

Requirements

7+ years of customer-facing technical delivery leadership; Track record of successfully leading large, complex, high-stakes customer engagements where customer outcomes depended on tight coordination and fast decision making, ideally involving AI; Excel in high ambiguity environments and know how to simplify complex and dynamic work; Move fluidly between system level understanding and execution level detail; Think strategically and pattern-match across deployments; Strong technical fluency and sharp sequencing instincts, confident discussing technical details, pressure-testing architectures, and making trade-offs; Have shipped AI/LLM systems and understand solution patterns, integration basics, and production pitfalls; Translator with executive presence who can make complex technical trade-offs legible to business leaders; Enjoy being onsite with customers to accelerate delivery (often 25-50%, sometimes higher)

Benefits

Relocation assistance