About the job
About the Team
The Forward Deployed Engineering team at OpenAI collaborates closely with clients to transform groundbreaking research into effective production systems. We work at the crucial intersection of customer engagement and core platform innovation.
About the Role
As a Technical Deployment Lead (TDL), you will play a vital role in shaping OpenAI's approach to delivering sophisticated systems to our customers. You will oversee the entire process—from development and shipping to user adoption. Your expertise will help translate business objectives into actionable technical plans, manage daily operations across various teams including FDEs, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, and collaborate with client teams to ensure that our solutions align with their strategic goals.
While this position does not involve direct management, you will be responsible for the end-to-end delivery of projects. This includes immersing yourself in customer workflows, defining success criteria, ensuring timely component delivery, and facilitating readiness and change management for seamless adoption. You will monitor project progress, manage dependencies, make key sequencing decisions, and drive prototypes from inception to MVP and scaling. Additionally, you will share insights from the field with our Product and Research teams to inform our roadmap and priorities.
Success in this role is measured primarily by the impact of your deployments—ensuring they deliver significant value to customers, drive adoption, and integrate seamlessly into their operations. Other key performance metrics include delivery reliability (adhering to milestones, minimizing reopen/churn), operational efficiency (reusing patterns across deployments), judgment under pressure, and the influence on product direction based on field feedback.
This is a role that demands high levels of trust and autonomy. Achieving success will require deep expertise in technical project management, a strong sense of ownership over outcomes, and the ability to engage deeply with customer workflows to tackle complex engineering challenges swiftly.
In this role, you will:
- Own the technical delivery plan for multiple interrelated workstreams, translating business goals into a structured roadmap complete with milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria.
- Manage daily engineering execution. Ensure that projects progress smoothly across OpenAI FDE and customer teams, keeping workflows unblocked and properly sequenced. Make real-time adjustments to scope and priority to maintain the critical path.
- Work closely with customer teams to facilitate production deployments and encourage user adoption.

