Technical Deployment Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering

About the team
OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team turns research breakthroughs into working systems. We embed with customers to solve high-leverage problems. We move quickly from prototype to production and surface reusable patterns that shape our platform. We operate at the intersection of deployment and development. We work closely with Product, Research, and Go-To-Market (GTM) to solve the hardest real-world problems with frontier models.

About the role
This is a founding role. As EMEA's first Technical Deployment Lead, you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers. You will drive execution across interdependent workstreams with FDEs, technical GTM, researchers, and customer engineers. You will partner with customer teams to understand the outcomes they need to achieve and ensure our technical delivery supports that value.

You will own the state of delivery. You will track progress, manage dependencies, and make sequencing decisions as work evolves. You will partner with Product and Research to ensure platform components ship on time and support deployment goals. You will move teams forward with clarity and pace. You will also share field insight with Product and Research to guide roadmap and prioritization.

We will measure your success by how reliably we ship, how well we navigate uncertainty, and how clearly we learn from deployment.

This role is based in London. We use a hybrid model of 3 days in office and offer relocation assistance. Travel up to 50% is required.

In this role you will

• Track and own delivery across OpenAI and customer teams. Keep progress unblocked and well sequenced.

• Work directly with customer SMEs and technical teams to understand their requirements and translate them into a delivery plan.

• Align scope, milestones, and ownership across FDE, technical GTM, researchers, and customer engineers.

• Partner with Product and Research to ensure platform components ship in time to support active deployments.

• Share field insight with Product and Research through clear, actionable feedback.

• Make real-time decisions on tradeoffs, scope, and priority.

• Structure fast-moving workstreams and keep teams focused on what matters.

• Codify working patterns and tools to improve delivery across future deployments.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Bring 7+ years of customer-facing technical delivery across engineering, research, and product teams.

• Have driven complex and high-pressure deployments where customer outcomes depended on tight coordination and fast decision making.

• Thrive in high ambiguity environments. Know how to simplify complex and dynamic work.

• Move fluidly between system level understanding and execution level detail.

• Have strong technical fluency and sharp sequencing instincts.

• Communicate with clarity. Lead with judgment. Know when to escalate.

• Build trust by staying close to the work, especially when it is hard.

• Are motivated to help customers build things that have not existed before — and make them work in production.

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 .

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

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.