Platform Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) -SF
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.
What this role actually needs.
Platform Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) -SF at OpenAI in San Francisco. UpJobz keeps this listing high-signal for applicants targeting serious high-tech roles across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. 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.
Day-to-day expectations
A clear list of the work this role is designed to cover.
- Provide hands-on leverage to customer pods: embed with customer-tagged FDE teams to support generalization, contributing directly in architecture, product shaping, refactoring, and implementation.
- Turn repeated signals into platform bets: translate cross-customer patterns into crisp hypotheses with clear success criteria, scope, and a validation plan that fits real account constraints.
- Raise the engineering bar through tooling and mentorship: set org-wide quality norms through high-signal code review and pairing, and build lightweight developer tooling that makes good architecture, readability, and correctness the default across FDE.
- Collaborate as part of cross-functional platform teams: partner closely with B2B Product, customer-tagged FDEs, ops, and business partners to bring the right products and platform capabilities to market.
- Lead complex platform capabilities end-to-end when needed: for high-leverage primitives like our Context Platform, act as DRI from requirements through implementation, make key tradeoffs explicit, and pull in customer pods early to keep the work grounded in real deployments.
- Bring 5+ years of software engineering or ML engineering experience with a track record of shipping 0→1 capabilities that other engineers or customers depend on. Experience in high-ambiguity, fast-iteration environments (startups or product-centric teams) is a plus.
What a strong candidate brings
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- Bring 5+ years of software engineering or ML engineering experience with a track record of shipping 0→1 capabilities that other engineers or customers depend on. Experience in high-ambiguity, fast-iteration environments (startups or product-centric teams) is a plus.
- Have owned customer-adjacent technical work end-to-end, from scoping and hypothesis-setting through production adoption, and improved outcomes through structured iteration (instrumentation, evals, error analysis, and tightening success criteria over time).
- Have built or operated systems where reliability, security, and governance materially shaped design (permissions/RBAC, auditability, data access boundaries, rollout safety, observability, and incident-driven hardening).
- Communicate clearly across engineering, product, go-to-market, and executive audiences , simplifying complex ideas and translating technical tradeoffs into adoption impact, sequencing decisions, and measurable outcomes. You can credibly “pitch” a platform bet in a customer conversation.
- Default to systems thinking: you turn ambiguous feedback, failures, and escalations into durable product requirements and reusable platform capabilities , not one-off fixes or bespoke delivery work.
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- Tailor your resume around ai and llm instead of sending a generic application.
- Use the first two bullets of your application to connect your background directly to platform engineer, forward deployed engineering (fde) -sf is a high-signal hybrid role in san francisco, and it is most realistic for united states residents.
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- $230K - $385K is visible, so calibrate your application around the posted range.
- Use united states residents as part of your positioning so the recruiter does not have to infer it.
- Show concrete examples of succeeding in hybrid environments.
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