Forward Deployed Engineering Manager, Financial Services
OpenAI is hiring a Forward Deployed Engineering Manager, Financial Services in New York, United States. It pays $302k-$385k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this forward deployed engineer role Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- Pay on this posting starts 68% higher than the typical forward deployed engineer posting on Level.
- Some of the work can be done remotely, according to the posting.
- The posting mentions AI research among its tools and skills.
- OpenAI has 809 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
About the Team
OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with banks, asset managers, insurers, and private capital firms to deploy production-grade AI systems in high-stakes financial environments. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development, embedding deeply with customers to translate frontier model capabilities into reliable, auditable systems that create measurable business impact. Our work turns early deployments into repeatable solution patterns, operating standards, and evaluation practices that scale across regulated financial institutions.
About the Role
As a foundational FDE manager, you’ll lead FDE through high-stakes, ambiguous financial services deployments and own technical and business value outcomes end to end. You’ll grow a team that can operate under pressure and help OpenAI learn from the field. You will work with customers who are experts in investment banking, trading, risk, compliance, underwriting, research, operations, or investment decision-making, translating complex workflows, data constraints, and regulatory requirements into production systems.
You’ll partner closely with Product, Research, Sales, and GTM to ensure fieldwork informs roadmap priorities, drives new exploration, and supports safe deployment at scale. Your decisions will influence how OpenAI is trusted by the customers closest to our deployment work. Your success will be measured by how consistently your team ships, how clearly you deliver signal to Research and Product, and how durable your team and delivery model prove to be.
This role is based in New York City We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. This role also will require travel up to 25%.
In this role, you will:
Lead and grow a team of FDE delivering production systems with frontier models
Own end-to-end delivery outcomes through clarity, speed, tight coordination, and technical quality
Codify what works into tools, playbooks, and roadmap inputs that create leverage for both OpenAI and our wider developer community
Notice early indicators and raise them with urgency, whether in product behavior, customer environments, or delivery practices
Use judgement to distinguish what requires action and what does not
Set a high bar for FDE performance and support each person’s growth through direct, actionable feedback
Define how we staff and support field teams that can scale without added complexity
You might thrive in this role if you:
Bring 10+ years of engineering or technical delivery experience, including 2+ years managing high-performing FDE or customer-facing engineers.
Have led high-pressure technical projects from prototype to production.
Write and review production-grade code across frontend and backend using Javascript or Python.
Simplify complex work and make fast, sound decisions under pressure.
Elevate team performance through clarity, not process.
Operate with urgency in ambiguous or evolving environments.
Translate field experience into sharp, actionable feedback for Product and Research.
Build deep trust with your team by modeling calm, focus, and judgment when it matters most.
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.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
How we rate this
Forward Deployed Engineering Manager, Financial Services at OpenAI rates 67 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in forward deployed engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $302k
- Typical forward deployed engineer job
- $180k
This posting starts 68% above the typical forward deployed engineer job. See forward deployed engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- Describe a typical day in a role like this one: which parts run through AI directly?
- If you removed AI from this role, what would be left, and how do you decide what still needs a human?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.
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