Deployment Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) - Platform

About the Team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. Within FDE, the Platform team turns promising use cases into repeatable solutions to deliver at scale. About the Role As a foundational Platform Deployment Lead (DL), you’ll shape new solutions and lead them from customer validation through launch and repeatable adoption. You’ll combine product judgment with hands-on customer deployment experience to identify valuable problems and define a path to scale. You’ll also help build the function, navigating significant ambiguity to define its scope and ways of working. You’ll partner with FDEs, Product, and GTM to align the roadmap, resolve shared dependencies, and balance customer commitments with reusable capabilities. Success means measurable customer and business impact, growing adoption, and building solutions that field teams or partners can deliver without depending on the originating team. This role is based in San Francisco or New York City, with 3 days in the office per week, relocation assistance, and travel up to 50%. In this role, you will: - Define clear solutions around a valuable problem and shape the path to market. - Use customer, field learnings, and market evidence to set the next proof point, narrow scope, and recommend where to invest. - Select design partners and use pilots to test value and repeatability. - Define quality and launch criteria. - Enable field teams and partners to scope, sell, and deliver the solution using playbooks and building the support model they need. - Track adoption and establish ongoing ownership as solutions scale. You might thrive in this role if you: - Bring 5+ years of product leadership or customer-facing technical delivery experience. - Have taken technical products from discovery through production and adoption. - Translate customer workflows and deployment evidence into clear product priorities. - Can reason through integrations, data, evaluations, and enterprise deployment constraints. - 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 trust and drive decisions across engineering, Product, GTM, partners, and customers. - Understand technical go-to-market and enjoy building new solutions in ambiguous environments. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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-b