SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization sits at the intersection of product, engineering, research, and go-to-market. The FDE Platform team acts as a leverage function that scales the broader FDE org's impact by embedding with customer-tagged pods to aid in architecting, product shaping, refactoring, and building.
As Engineering Manager for Platform FDE, you will lead a small team that multiplies the impact of the broader FDE organization. Your mandate is to increase the rate at which customer-grounded ideas become durable, generalizable platform bets by providing hands-on product and engineering leverage to customer-tagged pods.
You will partner with customer-tagged FDEs driving delivery and customer outcomes, embedding Platform FDE capacity where it provides the highest leverage. In practice, this means working in the trenches on architecture, product shaping, refactoring, hardening, and reusable abstractions while preserving pod ownership of customer understanding and day-to-day execution. You will collaborate closely with the B2B Platform Team and other long-term owners to align early on what should generalize, what should remain customer-specific, and what "ready for handoff" looks like.
Key responsibilities include: guiding a focused portfolio of platform bets with explicit hypotheses and success criteria; ensuring the team ships working software with design partners and iterates based on real-world adoption; co-developing with long-term owners on architecture and handoff criteria; maintaining a high engineering bar for design, code quality, testing, and observability; coaching and developing engineers through direct feedback and team mechanisms; and operating with high judgment to drive outcomes through partnership across stakeholders.
The role is based in San Francisco with a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is offered. Travel is optional-by-project and typically under 10%, with occasional spikes for key embeds or launches.
Requirements: 8+ years of engineering experience, including 2+ years managing high-performance engineers. You should be deeply customer-obsessed and able to partner credibly with senior stakeholders while maintaining a high bar for delivery and technical rigor. You naturally act as a shepherd, elevating and refining others' ideas and making disciplined scale vs. pause calls. You excel at cross-functional execution, forming tight partnerships with engineering, product, research, and GTM teams without needing formal authority. You can build inclusive team mechanics—rotations, mentorship, and scoped ownership—that increase collaboration across teams.
