SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team is seeking a Deployment Lead to own the end-to-end delivery of complex AI systems to Financial Services customers. You will define how OpenAI delivers to banks, asset managers, and private capital investors, translating business outcomes into technical execution plans and driving adoption of next-generation AI capabilities.
In this role, you will own the technical delivery plan for multiple interdependent work streams, translating business objectives into roadmaps with clear milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria. You'll run day-to-day engineering execution across OpenAI Forward Deployed Engineers, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, keeping progress unblocked and making real-time trade-offs to protect the critical path.
You will embed directly with customer teams to land production deployments and drive adoption. This includes mapping workflows, shaping tools and integrations, translating requirements into delivery plans, and leading onboarding and change management. You'll partner with Product and Research to ensure platform components and research work streams align with deployment timelines.
You will codify solution patterns and extract reusable approaches from field work to improve product and models. You'll own value cases and ROI measurement—setting impact hypotheses, baselines, and KPIs, then running pre- and post-deployment measurement to report to executive sponsors. Success is measured primarily by deployment impact (measurable value against customer goals, adoption, workflow criticality), delivery reliability, operating leverage, judgment under pressure, and product impact on roadmaps.
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. The role is based in New York City with a hybrid model (3 days in office per week). Travel up to 50% is required, with frequent onsite customer engagement (25-50%, sometimes higher).
REQUIREMENTS:
- 7+ years of customer-facing technical delivery leadership with expertise in Financial Services industry
- Track record of successfully leading large, complex, high-stakes customer engagements where outcomes depended on tight coordination and fast decision-making, ideally involving AI
- Excel in high-ambiguity environments; ability to simplify complex and dynamic work
- Fluidity between system-level understanding and execution-level detail; ability to dive into customer workflows/data, map constraints, sketch architectures, and move ambiguous problems to shipped systems
- Strategic thinking and pattern-matching ability; can step back from execution detail, recognize broader trends across deployments, and connect customer needs to scalable solutions
- Strong technical fluency and sharp sequencing instincts; confident discussing technical details, pressure-testing architectures, and making trade-offs
- Shipped AI/LLM systems; understand solution patterns, integration basics, and production pitfalls
- Translator with executive presence; ability to make complex technical trade-offs legible to business leaders and convert strategy into day-to-day technical execution
- Comfort being onsite with customers to accelerate delivery
