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

About The Team

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team turns research breakthroughs into production-grade systems. We embed deeply with customers to solve high-leverage problems and act as the delivery engine for our most complex large-scale engagements. We move quickly from prototype to production and surface reusable patterns that shape our platform. We operate at the intersection of deployment and development – working closely with OpenAI Research, Product and Partnerships.

About The Role

As a Technical Deployment Lead (TDL), you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers. You will own how they are built, shipped, and adopted. You’ll translate business outcomes into a technical plan, run day-to-day execution across FDEs, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, and partner with customer teams to ensure delivery supports their goals. 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. You’ll track progress, manage dependencies, make sequencing decisions, and drive 0→1 prototypes through MVP and scale. You will also share field insights with Product and Research to guide roadmap and priorities. Success will be measured first and foremost by impact - deployments that deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to their workflows.

Additional Measures of Success

• Delivery reliability (milestones hit, low reopen/churn)
• Operating leverage (patterns reused across deployments)
• Judgment under pressure
• Product impact (field signal that shifts roadmaps/architectures)

Success Requires

• Deep technical project management expertise
• Extreme ownership of outcomes
• An ability to immerse in customer workflows and partner with customer teams to solve complex engineering problems at pace

Role Location & Work Model

This role is based in NYC. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. Travel between 25%- 50% is required.

What You Will 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
• Track and drive delivery across OpenAI FDE and customer teams
• Keep progress 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
• 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
• Extract reusable patterns and package field signals to improve product and models
• Ownt value cases and ROI
• Set impact hypotheses, baselines, and KPIs; run pre-/post-deployment measurement and report to exec sponsors

What You Will Thrive In

• 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
• Moves fluidly between system level understanding and execution level detail; can dive into customer workflows/data, map constraints, sketch architectures and move ambiguous problems to shipped systems
• Think strategically and pattern-match. Able to step back from execution detail, recognize broader trends across deployments, and connect customer needs to scalable, reusable solutions
• Have strong technical fluency and sharp sequencing instincts. Confident discussing technical details, pressure-testing architectures, and making trade-offs
• Have shipped AI/LLM systems. You understand solution patterns, integration basics, and production pitfalls
• Have expertise in at least one major sector (e.g., healthcare, energy, financial services, semiconductors, IT) to elevate solution framing and credibility

Qualifications

• 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
• Moves fluidly between system level understanding and execution level detail; can dive into customer workflows/data, map constraints, sketch architectures and move ambiguous problems to shipped systems
• Think strategically and pattern-match. Able to step back from execution detail, recognize broader trends across deployments, and connect customer needs to scalable, reusable solutions
• Have strong technical fluency and sharp sequencing instincts. Confident discussing technical details, pressure-testing architectures, and making trade-offs
• Have shipped AI/LLM systems. You understand solution patterns, integration basics, and production pitfalls
• Have expertise in at least one major sector (e.g., healthcare, energy, financial services, semiconductors, IT) to elevate solution framing and credibility

OpenAI

We are 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.