Technical Deployment Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)- Platform
OpenAI · San Francisco
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. The FDE Platform team is primarily a leverage function that scales the FDE org’s impact to OpenAI’s platform and products. We provide hands-on leverage by embedding with customer-tagged FDE pods to aid in architecting, product shaping, refactoring, and building. This team is perfect for highly collaborative software engineers who love innovating on cutting-edge products with other builders. 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). This role is