Deployment Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) - Platform

About the role

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. The Platform team within FDE turns promising use cases into repeatable solutions delivered at scale. As a foundational Platform Deployment Lead, you will shape new solutions and lead them from customer validation through launch and repeatable adoption, combining product judgment with hands-on customer deployment experience. You will also help build the function, defining its scope and ways of working. The 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%.

Key responsibilities

• 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 run 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 build the support model they need.
• Track adoption and establish ongoing ownership as solutions scale.
• Partner with FDEs, Product and GTM to align the roadmap, resolve shared dependencies and balance customer commitments with reusable capabilities.

Required profile

• 5+ years of product leadership or customer-facing technical delivery experience.
• Experience taking technical products from discovery through production and adoption.
• Able to translate customer workflows and deployment evidence into clear product priorities.
• Comfortable in ambiguity, building new functions and making sound decisions with incomplete information.
• Ability to build trust and drive decisions across engineering, Product, GTM, partners and customers.

Required skills

• Reasoning through integrations, data, evaluations and enterprise deployment constraints.
• Understanding of technical go-to-market and building new solutions in ambiguous environments.