About the job
As a foundational FDE manager, you’ll lead FDE through high-stakes, ambiguous customer deployments and own technical and business value outcomes end to end. You’ll grow a team that can operate under pressure and help OpenAI learn from the field. You’ll partner closely with Product, Research, Sales, and GTM to ensure fieldwork informs roadmap priorities, drives new exploration, and supports safe deployment at scale. Your decisions will influence how OpenAI is trusted by the customers closest to our deployment work. Your success will be measured by how consistently your team ships, how clearly you deliver signal to Research and Product, and how durable your team and delivery model prove to be.
Responsibilities
Lead and grow a team of FDE delivering production systems with frontier models
Own end-to-end delivery outcomes through clarity, speed, tight coordination, and technical quality
Codify what works into tools, playbooks, and roadmap inputs that create leverage for both OpenAI and our wider developer community
Notice early indicators and raise them with urgency, whether in product behavior, customer environments, or delivery practices
Use judgement to distinguish what requires action and what does not
Set a high bar for FDE performance and support each person’s growth through direct, actionable feedback
Define how we staff and support field teams that can scale without added complexity
Qualifications
Minimum
Bring 8+ years of engineering or technical delivery experience, including 2+ years managing high-performing FDE or customer-facing engineers
Have led high-pressure technical projects from prototype to production
Write and review production-grade code across frontend and backend using Javascript or Python
Simplify complex work and make fast, sound decisions under pressure
Elevate team performance through clarity, not process
Operate with urgency in ambiguous or evolving environments
Translate field experience into sharp, actionable feedback for Product and Research
Build deep trust with your team by modeling calm, focus, and judgment when it matters most
Preferred
No preferred qualifications listed.