SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. As Deployment Lead, you will own the end-to-end technical delivery of complex AI systems to enterprise customers, with a focus on Financial Services.
You will define how OpenAI delivers to customers—owning how systems are built, shipped, and adopted. Your responsibilities include:
• Translating business outcomes into technical delivery plans with clear milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria across multiple interdependent work streams.
• Running day-to-day engineering execution across OpenAI FDE teams, Researchers, and Customer Engineers. You'll track progress, unblock work, sequence priorities, and make real-time trade-offs to protect the critical path.
• Embedding with customer teams to map workflows, shape tools and integrations, and drive production deployments and adoption. You'll lead onboarding, change management, and ensure delivery aligns with customer goals.
• Partnering with Product and Research to ensure platform components and research initiatives land on time to support deployment timelines.
• Codifying solution patterns and extracting reusable approaches from field work to improve product and models.
• Owning value cases and ROI measurement. You'll set impact hypotheses, establish baselines and KPIs, run pre- and post-deployment measurement, and report to executive sponsors.
• Shaping how OpenAI engages Financial Services customers.
Success is measured primarily by deployment impact—systems that deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to workflows. Secondary measures include delivery reliability, operating leverage across deployments, judgment under pressure, and product impact from field signals.
This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role requiring deep technical project management expertise, extreme ownership of outcomes, and the ability to immerse in customer workflows and solve complex engineering problems at pace. You'll work hybrid (3 days/week in office) with up to 50% travel required, often embedding onsite with customers.
REQUIREMENTS:
• 7+ years of customer-facing technical delivery leadership
• Track record of successfully leading large, complex, high-stakes customer engagements where outcomes depended on tight coordination and fast decision-making, ideally involving AI
• Ability to excel in high-ambiguity environments and simplify complex, dynamic work
• Fluidity between system-level understanding and execution-level detail; ability to dive into customer workflows, map constraints, sketch architectures, and move ambiguous problems to shipped systems
• Strategic thinking and pattern-matching ability; capacity to recognize trends across deployments and connect customer needs to scalable solutions
• Strong technical fluency and sharp sequencing instincts; confidence discussing technical details, pressure-testing architectures, and making trade-offs
• Shipped AI/LLM systems; understanding of solution patterns, integration basics, and production pitfalls
• Executive presence and translation skills; ability to make complex technical trade-offs legible to business leaders and convert strategy into day-to-day execution
• Comfort being onsite with customers frequently (25-50%, sometimes higher) to accelerate delivery
