Platform Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

OpenAI, Inc.

Job Overview

Location

San Francisco

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• As the Engineering Manager for Platform FDE at OpenAI, you will spearhead a high-impact team dedicated to amplifying the reach and effectiveness of our broader Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization. This pivotal role sits at the nexus of cutting-edge AI research, product development, and real-world application, where you will empower a small, elite team to act as a force multiplier. Your core mission is to accelerate the transformation of customer-driven insights and nascent ideas into robust, scalable, and enduring platform capabilities. You will achieve this by providing critical, hands-on engineering and product leverage to customer-aligned FDE pods, enabling them to tackle complex challenges and deliver exceptional outcomes.
• The FDE organization itself operates at the forefront, bridging the gap between OpenAI's advanced platform technologies and the practical needs of our design partners and customers. We translate groundbreaking AI capabilities into tangible software solutions, establish repeatable engineering patterns, and contribute to the development of durable products. The FDE Platform team, which you will lead, is designed as a strategic leverage function. We embed our expertise within customer-focused FDE pods, offering specialized support in areas such as architectural design, product shaping, code refactoring, and the development of foundational software components. This is an ideal environment for highly collaborative software engineers who are passionate about innovating with state-of-the-art products and working alongside other dedicated builders.
• In this leadership capacity, you will forge strong partnerships with customer-aligned FDEs who are instrumental in driving product delivery and achieving critical customer outcomes. You will strategically deploy your team's capacity to areas where it can deliver the greatest leverage. This involves actively participating in the technical and product development lifecycle, contributing to architecture decisions, refining product direction, optimizing existing codebases, enhancing system robustness, and developing reusable abstractions. Crucially, you will maintain a delicate balance, ensuring that the customer pods retain ownership of their deep customer understanding and day-to-day execution, while your team provides specialized, high-leverage support.
• A significant aspect of your role will involve close collaboration with our dedicated B2B Platform Team and other long-term product owners. This partnership is essential for aligning on strategic decisions regarding what features should be generalized for broader platform adoption, what aspects should remain customer-specific, and establishing clear criteria for when a component is 'ready for handoff' to the long-term ownership teams. This ensures a seamless transition and sustainable integration of new capabilities into the core platform.
• This position demands a unique blend of strong engineering leadership acumen and astute, product-oriented judgment. You will be responsible for managing a focused portfolio of platform incubation initiatives, each defined by explicit hypotheses, rigorous success criteria, and measurable adoption outcomes. Your accountability extends to translating the valuable signals derived from customer deployments into reusable, high-quality capabilities that can be efficiently handed off to their designated long-term owners. Success in this role hinges on your ability to lead through influence, navigating complex stakeholder landscapes, upholding an exceptionally high technical standard, and meticulously defining clear lines of responsibility between your team, the customer pods, and our partner organizations.
• You will guide a focused portfolio of platform bets, steering the direction for a select number of high-signal, impactful problems. This involves formulating clear hypotheses, defining success metrics, sequencing development efforts, and tracking measurable adoption outcomes to ensure strategic alignment and impact. Furthermore, you will be instrumental in building and validating solutions directly with customers. This means ensuring your team ships functional software in collaboration with design partners, diligently instruments usage and outcomes, and iterates rapidly based on real-world adoption feedback and identified constraints.
• A key responsibility is the co-development with long-term owners. You will partner proactively with the B2B Platform team and other durable owners from the outset. This collaboration focuses on aligning on architectural principles, defining robust interfaces, addressing security and governance requirements, and establishing clear handoff criteria. You will remain actively engaged through the validation phase and the subsequent journey towards scaling these capabilities.
• Maintaining a high engineering bar is paramount. You will set and rigorously enforce standards for design excellence, code quality, comprehensive testing strategies, effective observability, and operational readiness, ensuring all developed components meet the stringent requirements for enterprise-grade use. Additionally, you will focus on growing and developing your team members. This involves providing consistent coaching and development through direct feedback, setting clear performance expectations, and establishing durable team mechanisms that foster strong execution and a sense of ownership.
• Finally, you will operate with exceptional judgment and influence. This means making clear, strategic trade-offs even in ambiguous situations, communicating decisions crisply and effectively across diverse stakeholder groups, and driving desired outcomes through collaborative partnerships rather than relying on formal authority. This role is based in San Francisco or New York City and operates on a hybrid work model, requiring three days per week in the office. Relocation assistance is available. While travel is optional and project-dependent, typically less than 10%, occasional spikes may occur for critical embeds or product launches.

🎯 Requirements

• 8+ years of progressive engineering experience, with a minimum of 2 years in a management role leading high-performance engineering teams.
• Demonstrated experience in customer-obsessed product development, with a proven ability to partner credibly with senior stakeholders while maintaining a high bar for technical rigor and delivery excellence.
• Strong leadership skills, characterized by the ability to act as a shepherd for ideas, refine hypotheses, and make disciplined 'scale vs. pause' decisions with clear, well-reasoned justifications.
• Proven success in cross-functional execution, establishing tight partnerships with engineering, product, research, and go-to-market teams to achieve outcomes without formal authority.
• Experience building and fostering inclusive team mechanics, such as rotations, mentorship programs, and scoped ownership, that enhance collaboration across teams rather than creating silos.

🏖️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and equity compensation.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
• Generous paid time off and holidays.
• Relocation assistance for eligible candidates.
• Opportunities for professional development and continuous learning.

Skills & Technologies

Hybrid

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OpenAI, Inc.

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About OpenAI, Inc.

OpenAI is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence research and deployment company founded in 2015. It develops large-scale AI models such as GPT, DALL-E, and Codex, providing cloud APIs and consumer applications like ChatGPT. Originally established as a non-profit, it later created a capped-profit subsidiary to attract capital while maintaining its mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

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