Platform Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) -SF

About this role

Join OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team as a Platform Engineer to build scalable platform capabilities by embedding with customer teams, translating repeated patterns into durable products, and raising engineering standards across the organization.

What you'll do

• Embed with customer-facing FDE pods to support architecture, product design, refactoring, and implementation
• Identify cross-customer patterns and develop platform hypotheses with clear success criteria and validation plans
• Lead end-to-end development of high-leverage platform primitives from requirements through production adoption
• Improve engineering quality through code review, mentorship, and lightweight developer tooling
• Collaborate with B2B Product, operations, and business partners to align platform capabilities with customer needs
• Translate technical feedback and production issues into generalizable platform requirements

What they're looking for

• Software engineering or ML systems development (5+ years)
• Building and shipping 0-to-1 product capabilities
• Customer-adjacent technical ownership and end-to-end delivery
• Reliability, security, and governance architecture (RBAC, auditability, observability)
• Cross-functional communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Systems thinking and structured iteration (instrumentation, evals, error analysis)
• High-ambiguity problem-solving in fast-moving environments
• Technical leadership and mentorship

Benefits

• Hybrid work (3 days in office per week)
• Based in San Francisco or New York
• Relocation assistance available
• Optional travel (~10%, project-dependent)
• Work on cutting-edge AI platform capabilities
• Collaborate with frontier AI research and deployment