infrastructure
Posted Feb 13Platform Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) -SF
at openai
San Francisco, United StatesHybrid
Responsibilities
- - Lead complex platform capabilities end-to-end when needed: for high-leverage primitives like our Context Platform, act as DRI from
Requirements
- About the team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) org sits at the intersection of product, engineering, research, and go-to-market.
- About the role Platform Engineer is a role within Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) for strong software and ML engineers who want to build new platform capabilities from scratch, grounded in real customer deployments.
- 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.
- - 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.
- About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence
Experience
- You might thrive in this role if you - Bring 5+ years of software engineering or ML engineering
Benefits
- 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
Additional details
- We take frontier platform capabilities into the real world with design partners, turning raw customer signal into shipped software, repeatable patterns, and durable products.
- The FDE Platform team is primarily a leverage function that scales the FDE org’s impact to OpenAI’s platform and products.
- We provide hands-on leverage by embedding with customer-tagged FDE pods to aid in architecting, product shaping, refactoring, and building.
- This team is perfect for highly collaborative software engineers who love innovating on cutting-edge products with other builders.
- You will partner with customer-tagged FDEs who are driving delivery and customer outcomes, and embed where you can provide the highest leverage.
- In practice that means working in the trenches on architecture, product shaping, refactoring, hardening, and reusable abstractions, while preserving the pod’s ownership of customer understanding and day-to-day execution.
- You will also collaborate closely with our B2B Platform Team and other long-term owners to align early on what should generalize, what should remain customer-specific, and what “ready for handoff” looks like.
- We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week.
- Travel is optional-by-project and typically <10%, with occasional spikes for key embeds or launches.
- In this role you will - 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.