Platform Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) - NYC

About this role

Join OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team as a Platform Engineer to build new capabilities from scratch while embedded with customer teams. You'll translate cross-customer patterns into platform bets, mentor through code review and tooling, and drive high-leverage primitives from requirements through production adoption.

What you'll do

• Embed with customer-tagged FDE pods to support architecture, product design, refactoring, and implementation
• Identify and validate cross-customer patterns into platform hypotheses with clear success criteria
• Set engineering quality standards through code review, pairing, and lightweight developer tooling
• Collaborate with B2B Product, operations, and business teams to ship platform capabilities
• Own complex platform primitives end-to-end as DRI, keeping work grounded in real deployments
• Drive structured iteration using instrumentation, evals, and error analysis to improve outcomes

What they're looking for

• Software or ML engineering (5+ years experience)
• 0→1 product development and shipping
• Systems design with focus on reliability, security, and governance
• Cross-functional communication (engineering, product, go-to-market, executive)
• Customer-adjacent technical ownership and scoping
• Systems thinking and requirements translation
• High-ambiguity fast-iteration environments
• Observability and incident-driven hardening

Benefits

• Hybrid work model (3 days in office per week) in San Francisco or NYC
• Relocation assistance available
• Optional project-based travel (typically <10%)
• Work on cutting-edge AI platform capabilities
• Collaborative environment with customer-focused teams