Technical Deployment Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)- Platform at Openai

Openai

San Francisco·15h ago

LeadFull-timeRustRailsAWSGoAI

Salary Range

$153,000 - $207,000 /year

Estimated

This salary is estimated based on similar roles. The actual salary may vary.

About the Role

We are seeking a founding Technical Deployment Lead (TDL) for OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) Platform team. This role is critical in ensuring successful deployments of our earliest design partner projects, from initial scoping to production adoption.

Key Responsibilities

→Define pilot scope and success criteria by partnering with customer sponsors and technical leads to translate goals into concrete plans and measurable outcomes.
→Own the delivery plan across work streams by building and running integrated milestones, dependencies, and execution rhythms across Applied, platform engineers, and customer teams.
→Drive stakeholder alignment and decision-making by leading internal and external working sessions, keeping tradeoffs explicit, unblocking decisions, and escalating crisply when needed.
→Ensure enterprise readiness from day one by pressure-testing security posture, permissions and access boundaries, audit-ability, and deployment/infra requirements as part of the delivery plan.
→Manage production adoption and value realization by driving onboarding, enablement, and change management so deployments land in real workflows and deliver measurable impact.
→Run multiple deployments with rigor by maintaining clear status, risks, and mitigations across concurrent pilots, and continuously adjusting plans to protect outcomes.
→Convert learnings into actionable next steps by synthesizing what worked and what broke into clear requirements, sequencing proposals, and improvements to the platform delivery approach.

Requirements

✓5+ years of experience leading complex, customer-facing technical delivery where you owned outcomes end-to-end in high-ambiguity environments.
✓Deep credibility with senior technical stakeholders, capable of whiteboarding architectures, reasoning about enterprise deployment constraints, and going in the weeds when required.
✓Strong instincts for enterprise security and governance, including permissions/RBAC, audit trails, data access boundaries, and rollout safety.
✓Ops-first background (e.g., platform delivery leadership, technical program/delivery leadership, product/engineering operations) and a track record of driving execution through matrixed teams.
✓Executive presence in communication, able to align sponsors, make tradeoffs legible, and keep teams focused on the critical path under pressure.