Description
Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Model Deployment for Business
Compensation
- $302K – $335K • Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
- Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
- 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
- Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
- Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
- 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
- Mental health and wellness support
- Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
- Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
- Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
- Relocation support for eligible employees
- Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.
This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.
About the team
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.
About the role
As a foundational FDE manager, you’ll lead FDE through high-stakes, ambiguous customer deployments and own technical and business value outcomes end to end. You’ll grow a team that can operate under pressure and help OpenAI learn from the field.
You’ll partner closely with Product, Research, Sales, and GTM to ensure fieldwork informs roadmap priorities, drives new exploration, and supports safe deployment at scale. Your decisions will influence how OpenAI is trusted by the customers closest to our deployment work. Your success will be measured by how consistently your team ships, how clearly you deliver signal to Research and Product, and how durable your team and delivery model prove to be.
This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. This role also will require travel up to 25%.
In this role you will
- Lead and grow a team of FDE delivering production systems with frontier models
- Own end-to-end delivery outcomes through clarity, speed, tight coordination, and technical quality
- Codify what works into tools, playbooks, and roadmap inputs that create leverage for both OpenAI and our wider developer community
- Notice early indicators and raise them with urgency, whether in product behavior, customer environments, or delivery practices
- Use judgement to distinguish what requires action and what does not
- Set a high bar for FDE performance and support each person’s growth through direct, actionable feedback
- Define how we staff and support field teams that can scale without added complexity
You might thrive in this role if you
- Bring 8+ years of engineering or technical delivery experience, including 2+ years managing high-performing FDE or customer-facing engineers
- Have led high-pressure technical projects from prototype to production
- Write and review production-grade code across frontend and backend using Javascript or Python
- Simplify complex work and make fast, sound decisions under pressure
- Elevate team performance through clarity, not process
- Operate with urgency in ambiguous or evolving environments
- Translate field experience into sharp, actionable feedback for Product and Research
- Build deep trust with your team by modeling calm, focus, and judgment when it matters most
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.