Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Legal-SF

About the team

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We embed deeply with users to solve high-leverage problems. We move quickly from prototype to deployment and surface patterns that shape the platform. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core development. We work closely with Product, Research, and Go-To-Market (GTM).

About the role

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to build and deploy AI systems for legal work. You will embed deeply with customers—often working closely with senior legal practitioners—to identify the right first use case, rapidly prototype a solution, and prove measurable value. Early engagements may focus on creating a “hero” workflow that shows how OpenAI’s models can support legal analysis, drafting, research, or real-time work with complex case records.

You will own the technical work from discovery and proof of concept through production adoption, while translating customer workflows and constraints into clear product feedback. As the motion matures, you will turn successful deployments into repeatable patterns that can scale across larger accounts and the broader legal market.

This role is based in San Francisco or New York City. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance. Travel up to 50% may be required.

In this role, you will

• Embed with law firms and legal teams to understand their workflows, identify high-value opportunities, and select the right initial use cases to prove value.

• Build full-stack systems that deliver customer value and sharpen how we learn

• Embed closely with customer teams, understand their needs, and guide adoption of what you build

• Make trade-offs between scope, speed, and quality; adjust plans to protect delivery

• Contribute directly in the code when progress or clarity depends on it

• Codify working patterns into tools, playbooks, or building blocks that others can use

• Share field feedback that helps Research and Product understand where the models succeed and where they can improve

You might thrive in this role if you

• Bring 5+ years of software engineering, ML engineering, or technical deployment experience with customer-facing ownership in financial services or adjacent regulated industries.

• Have experience with legal technology, legal services, compliance-heavy workflows, or professional services; this is helpful but not required.

• Have owned complex AI or data-driven systems end-to-end, from scoping through production adoption, in environments where errors carry real financial or regulatory consequences.

• Write and review production-grade code across backend and frontend systems using Python, JavaScript, or comparable stacks.

• Have deployed systems powered by LLMs or generative models and understand how model behavior, evaluation, and guardrails affect user trust and business outcomes.

• Communicate clearly across engineering, product, risk, compliance, and executive stakeholders, translating technical trade-offs into decision quality and risk posture.

• Apply systems thinking with high execution standards, turning incidents, escalations, and failures into improved operating standards and repeatable deployment patterns.

• Stay calm and decisive when delivery is urgent, ambiguous, and high-stakes.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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