Platform Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

About the team

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) org sits at the intersection of product, engineering, research, and go-to-market. We take frontier platform capabilities into the real world with design partners, turning raw customer signal into shipped software, repeatable patterns, and durable products.

The FDE Platform team is primarily a leverage function that scales the FDE org’s impact to OpenAI’s platform and products. We provide hands-on leverage by embedding with customer-tagged FDE pods to aid in architecting, product shaping, refactoring, and building. This team is perfect for highly collaborative software engineers who love innovating on cutting-edge products with other builders.

About the role

As the Engineering Manager for Platform FDE, you will lead a small team that acts as a multiplier for the broader FDE org. Your mandate is to increase the rate at which customer-grounded ideas become durable, generalizable platform bets, by providing hands-on product and engineering leverage to customer-tagged pods.

You will partner with customer-tagged FDEs who are driving delivery and customer outcomes, and embed Platform FDE capacity where they can provide the highest leverage. In practice that means working in the trenches on architecture, product shaping, refactoring, hardening, and reusable abstractions, while preserving the pod’s ownership of customer understanding and day-to-day execution. You will also collaborate closely with our B2B Platform Team and other long-term owners to align early on what should generalize, what should remain customer-specific, and what “ready for handoff” looks like.

This role requires a combination of engineering leadership and strong product-oriented judgment. You will manage a focused portfolio of platform incubation work with explicit hypotheses, success criteria, and measurable adoption outcomes, and you will be accountable for translating deployment signal into reusable capabilities that can be handed off cleanly to long-term owners. You will be expected to lead through influence across multiple stakeholders, uphold a high technical bar, and establish clear responsibility boundaries between your team, customer pods, and partner organizations.

This role is based in San Francisco and is not a travel role. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. Travel is optional-by-project and typically <10%, with occasional spikes for key embeds or launches.

In this role you will

• Guide a focused portfolio of platform bets: Steer direction for a small number of high-signal problems, with clear hypotheses, success criteria, sequencing, and measurable adoption outcomes.

• Build and validate with customers: Ensure the team ships working software with design partners, instruments usage and outcomes, and iterates quickly based on real-world adoption and constraints.

• Co-develop with long-term owners: Partner early with B2B Platform (and other durable owners) to align on architecture, interfaces, security/governance requirements, and handoff criteria, staying engaged through validation and the path to scale.

• Maintain a high engineering bar: Set and enforce standards for design, code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness appropriate for enterprise use.

• Grow and develop the team: Coach and develop engineers through direct feedback, clear expectations, and durable team mechanisms that reinforce execution and ownership.

• Operate with high judgment and influence: Make clear tradeoffs under ambiguity, communicate decisions crisply across stakeholders, and drive outcomes through partnership rather than formal authority.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Bring 8+ years of engineering experience, including 2+ years managing high-performance engineers

• Are deeply customer-obsessed and can partner credibly with senior stakeholders while keeping a high bar for delivery and technical rigor.

• Naturally act as a shepherd: you elevate and refine others’ ideas, sharpen hypotheses, and make disciplined “scale vs pause” calls with clear reasoning.

• Excel at cross-functional execution, forming tight partnerships with engineering, product, research, and GTM teams to deliver outcomes without needing formal authority.

• Can build inclusive team mechanics – rotations, mentorship, and scoped ownership – that increase collaboration across teams rather than creating a gated platform group.

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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