Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) - AI Infra

About the role

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. As a Forward Deployed Engineer for AI Infrastructure, you will work directly with customer engineers, researchers and product engineers on optimization problems across semiconductors and AI infrastructure, writing and debugging software, running experiments against real workloads and hardware, and improving the tools used across engagements. The role is based in San Francisco with a hybrid model of 3 days in the office per week, relocation assistance, and travel of up to 50%.

Key responsibilities

• Own technical delivery for semiconductor and AI-infrastructure workstreams, from scoping and prototypes through validation, production deployment and adoption.
• Work with customer engineers to define workloads, baselines and success criteria, and help the work become part of their workflows.
• Build and debug production-quality software such as harnesses, integrations and product features for chip design, verification, inference and performance engineering.
• Design reproducible experiments, evaluations, graders and benchmarks to validate correctness and performance.
• Investigate model behavior and failure modes with researchers, contributing evaluation or training data and targeted experiments.
• Contribute to core product development with product engineers, resolving tooling gaps and bringing field learning into product decisions.
• Lead technical discussions and turn successful approaches into reusable software, tools and playbooks.

Required profile

• 5+ years of engineering or technical deployment experience, including customer-facing work.
• Experience delivering complex systems in fast-moving or ambiguous environments.
• Experience building or deploying systems powered by LLMs or generative models.
• Hands-on experience with applied machine learning, model evaluation, data quality, experimentation or model-behavior analysis.
• Experience in semiconductor development, data-center systems or inference engineering is helpful.