Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) - AI Infra - SF

Forward Deployed Engineering - San Francisco

About the team

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development.

About the role

Forward Deployed Engineers lead complex deployments of frontier models in production. You will embed with customers where model performance matters, delivery is urgent, and ambiguity is the default. You will use this to map their problems, structure delivery, and ship fast.

As a Forward Deployed Engineer for AI Infra, you will work directly with customer engineers, researchers and product engineers on optimization problems across semiconductors and AI infrastructure. You will write and debug software, run experiments against real workloads and hardware, and improve the tools and product used across engagements.

You will help define the problem and success criteriaance checks, and contributing improvements that other engagements can use.

Success in this role means owning the delivery state across workstreams. You will hold the bar on quality and pace and help OpenAI learn through execution.

This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance.

Travel up to 50% is required.

In this role, you will:

• Own technical delivery for agreed semiconductor and AI-infrastructure workstreams, from initial scoping and prototypes through validation, production deployment and adoption.
• Work closely with customer engineers to understand their workflows and constraints, define workloads, baselines and success criteria, and help what you build become part of how they work.
• Scope and sequence delivery, identify dependencies and blockers early, and make practical trade-offs between scope, speed and quality as the work develops.
• Personally build and debug production-quality softwareance engineering.
• Design reproducible experimentsance, and establish whether improvements hold up in real engineering environments.
• Investigate model behavior and failure modes alongside researchers, contributing evaluation or training data and targeted experiments where they can improve the underlying capability.
• Contribute directly to core product development, working with product engineers to resolve tooling gaps, ship useful improvements and bring field learning into product decisions.
• Lead technical discussions and maintain alignment across customer, Product and Research teams. Build the domain and product fluency to explain capabilities, limitations and results, and keep ownership, risks and next steps clear.
• Turn successful approaches into reusable software, tools and playbooks, reducing the effort needed for future engagements and helping customer teams operate what has been built.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Bring 5+ years of engineering or technical deployment experience that includes customer-facing work
• Have scoped and delivered complex systems in fast-moving or ambiguous environments
• Write and review production-grade software, and debug unfamiliar systems across code, integrations and runtime behavior.
• Have built or deployed systems powered by LLMs or generative models and understand how model behaviour affects product experience
• Simplify complexity and make fast, sound decisions under pressure
• Communicate clearly with engineers, product teams, and customer stakeholders
• Spot risks early and adjust without slowing down
• Model calm and judgment when the stakes are high
• Have a strong product sense and have contributed towards productizing efforts
• Have hands-on experience with applied machine learning, model evaluation, data quality, experimentation, or model-behavior analysis
• Can turn an ambiguous technical problem into a clear evaluation, a credible baseline, and a reproducible experiment
• Are comfortable learning unfamiliar technical domains and working closely with researchers, product engineers and customer engineers. Experience in semiconductor development, data-center systems or inference engineering is helpful.

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 the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employeration, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable lawation technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

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.

Compensation

$185K – $300K + Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factorsance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.