Description
Technical Deployment Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)- Platform
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Model Deployment for Business
Compensation
- $198K – $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.
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.
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.
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).
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 escalate crisply 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.