Deployment Lead, FDE - NYC

About the role

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. As Deployment Lead, you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers, owning how they are built, shipped and adopted. You will translate business outcomes into a technical plan, run day-to-day execution across FDEs, Researchers and Customer Engineers, and partner with customer teams. The role is based in New York City with a hybrid model of 3 days in the office per week, relocation assistance, and travel of up to 50%.

Key responsibilities

• Own the technical delivery plan for multiple interdependent work streams and turn business objectives into a roadmap with milestones, dependencies and acceptance criteria.
• Run day-to-day engineering execution, keeping progress unblocked and sequenced and making real-time trade-offs on scope and priority.
• Embed with customer teams to land production deployments and drive adoption, mapping workflows and shaping tools and integrations.
• Lead onboarding, adoption and change management, and partner with Product and Research so components land in time for deployment goals.
• Codify solution patterns and evals, extracting reusable patterns and packaging field signals.
• Own value cases and ROI, setting impact hypotheses, baselines and KPIs, running pre- and post-deployment measurement and reporting to exec sponsors.

Required profile

• 7+ years of customer-facing technical delivery leadership.
• Track record of leading large, complex, high-stakes customer engagements, ideally involving AI.
• Ability to excel in high-ambiguity environments and move between system-level understanding and execution detail.
• Strong technical fluency, sequencing instincts and confidence discussing technical details and architectures.
• Experience shipping AI/LLM systems.
• Willingness to work onsite with customers, often 25-50% of the time.