Manager, Deployment Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

About the Team

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) 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

As a foundational Deployment Lead Manager (DL Manager), you'll lead and grow a team of DLs through high-stakes customer deployments, owning technical and business outcomes end to end. You'll help build the function as you lead it, navigating significant ambiguity to define its scope and ways of working.

You'll partner with FDE, Product, Research, and GTM to balance customer-specific solutions with reusable capabilities and ensure field insights inform product priorities. Drawing on your experience leading complex technical deployments and products, you'll guide decisions on scope, feasibility, sequencing, and delivery readiness, helping your team make sound tradeoffs and build lasting customer trust.

Success will be measured by the impact of your team's deployments, the growth of your DLs, and how effectively the team and delivery model scale.

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 will require travel up to 25%.

In this role, you will:

• Lead and grow a team of DLs delivering production systems with frontier models
• Own end-to-end delivery outcomes, from scoping through production, adoption, and handoff
• Set direction and build trust across technical teams, GTM, and customer executives
• Codify what works into practical playbooks, consistent delivery practices, and product roadmap inputs
• Set a high bar for DL performance through hands-on coaching, actionable feedback, and career development
• Make staffing decisions, develop future DL leaders, and build a team that scales without unnecessary complexity

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Bring 8+ years of customer-facing technical delivery or product leadership experience, including 2+ years managing high-performing teams.
• Have personally led complex technical deployments from prototype through production, adoption, and handoff.
• Have a strong product mindset, ideally with product management experience, and can balance customer-specific needs with reusable solutions.
• Thrive in ambiguity and enjoy building new functions: creating structure where little exists, making sound decisions with incomplete information, and adapting as priorities evolve.
• Build deep trust across technical teams, Product, Research, GTM, and customer leadership.
• Have a strong track record of hiring, coaching, and developing technical, customer-facing talent; elevate team performance through clarity, not process.