Manager, Deployment Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)
About this role
About the Team
OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) 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 Deployment Lead Manager (DL Manager), you’ll lead and grow a team of DLs through high-stakes customer deployments, owning technical and business outcomes end to end. You’ll help build the function as you lead it, navigating significant ambiguity to define its scope and ways of working.
You’ll partner with FDE, Product, Research, and GTM to balance customer-specific solutions with reusable capabilities and ensure field insights inform product priorities. Drawing on your experience leading complex technical deployments and products, you’ll guide decisions on scope, feasibility, sequencing, and delivery readiness, helping your team make sound tradeoffs and build lasting customer trust.
Success will be measured by the impact of your team’s deployments, the growth of your DLs, and how effectively the team and delivery model scale.
This role is based in New York City. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. This role will require travel up to 25%.
In this role, you will:
Lead and grow a team of DLs delivering production systems with frontier models
Own end-to-end delivery outcomes, from scoping through production, adoption, and handoff
Set direction and build trust across technical teams, GTM, and customer executives
Codify what works into practical playbooks, consistent delivery practices, and product roadmap inputs
Set a high bar for DL performance through hands-on coaching, actionable feedback, and career development
Make staffing decisions, develop future DL leaders, and build a team that scales without unnecessary complexity
You might thrive in this role if you:
Bring 8+ years of customer-facing technical delivery or product leadership experience, including 2+ years managing high-performing teams.
Have personally led complex technical deployments from prototype through production, adoption, and handoff.
Have a strong product mindset, ideally with product management experience, and can balance customer-specific needs with reusable solutions.
Thrive in ambiguity and enjoy building new functions: creating structure where little exists, making sound decisions with incomplete information, and adapting as priorities evolve.
Build deep trust across technical teams, Product, Research, GTM, and customer leadership.
Have a strong track record of hiring, coaching, and developing technical, customer-facing talent; elevate team performance through clarity, not process.
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.
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.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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