OpenAI
Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Legal-SF
About this role
OpenAI seeks a Forward Deployed Engineer to embed with law firms and legal teams, building and deploying AI systems that solve high-impact legal workflows. You'll own the full lifecycle from discovery through production adoption, translating customer needs into product feedback while scaling successful patterns across the legal market.
What you'll do
- Embed with law firms to understand workflows, identify high-value opportunities, and select use cases to prove AI value
- Build full-stack systems that deliver customer value and inform product learning
- Guide customer adoption and drive measurable business outcomes
- Make pragmatic trade-offs between scope, speed, and quality to protect delivery timelines
- Contribute hands-on code when necessary to unblock progress or clarify solutions
- Codify working patterns into reusable tools, playbooks, and building blocks; surface field feedback to shape product and research
What they're looking for
- 5+ years software or ML engineering with customer-facing ownership in regulated industries
- End-to-end ownership of complex AI/data systems from scoping through production in high-stakes environments
- Production-grade code in Python, JavaScript, or equivalent stacks across backend and frontend
- LLM or generative model deployment with understanding of model behavior, evaluation, and guardrails
- Cross-functional communication with engineering, product, risk, compliance, and executive stakeholders
- Systems thinking with high execution standards and incident-driven process improvement
- Legal technology or compliance-heavy workflows experience (helpful but not required)
- Composure and decisiveness under urgent, ambiguous, high-stakes delivery pressure
Benefits
- Hybrid work model: 3 days per week in office (San Francisco or New York City)
- Relocation assistance available
- Work at the intersection of customer delivery and core AI research and development
- Direct impact shaping OpenAI's platform through field feedback and patterns
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OpenAI
OpenAI builds AI infrastructure and products, including large-scale data center campuses for AI computing and generative AI applications for enterprise customers. The company is hiring civil engineers, project engineers, electrical design engineers, data center R&D engineers, and AI deployment engineers to expand its infrastructure capabilities and help customers deploy AI solutions.
View all jobs at OpenAILikely interview questions
- Describe a complex AI or data-driven system you owned end-to-end in a regulated environment. What were the highest-stakes failure modes, and how did you mitigate them?
- Tell us about a time you deployed an LLM or generative model in production. How did you evaluate model behavior, set up guardrails, and measure user trust?