Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) - Seattle

About the role

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) lead complex end-to-end deployments of frontier models in production alongside strategic customers, owning discovery, technical scoping, system design, build and production rollout while partnering with customer engineering and domain teams. The role is based in Seattle 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 across multiple deployments, from first prototype to stable production.
• Build full-stack systems that deliver customer value and improve how the company learns.
• Work closely with customer teams, understand their needs and guide adoption of what you build.
• Scope work, sequence delivery and remove blockers early, making trade-offs between scope, speed and quality.
• Contribute directly in code when progress or clarity depends on it.
• Codify working patterns into tools, playbooks or building blocks others can use.
• Share field feedback so Research and Product know where models succeed and where they can improve.

Required profile

• 5+ years of engineering or technical deployment experience, including customer-facing work.
• Experience scoping and delivering complex systems in fast-moving or ambiguous environments.
• Experience building or deploying systems powered by LLMs or generative models, understanding how model behaviour affects product experience.
• Ability to simplify complexity, make fast sound decisions under pressure and communicate clearly with engineers, product teams and customer stakeholders.

Required skills

• Writing and reviewing production-grade code across frontend and backend using Python, JavaScript or comparable stacks.