Ops Lead, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

About the team

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production-grade AI systems. FDE sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, Research, and GTM. We embed deeply with users to solve high-leverage problems and surface patterns that shape our platform. We take frontier capabilities into the real world and translate customer signal into durable solutions, repeatable patterns, and product direction.

About the role

We’re hiring an Ops Lead to build, run, and evolve the systems that enable the FDE team to execute at scale. This role sits at the core of the team and directly shapes how effectively we deploy frontier AI in the real world. You’ll turn fast-moving signals from the field and the business into clear operational plans, aligning project demand with FDE capacity, driving staffing decisions, and ensuring the portfolio scales predictably.

You will partner closely with Business, Product, and GTM stakeholders to improve how we prioritize, plan, and coordinate. Rather than leading a single program, run core operating rhythms for the team, such as portfolio reviews, execution tracking, and quarterly planning, ensuring leaders have clear visibility into risks and delivery progress as the organization scales. This is a senior IC role with broad ownership across the FDE operating model.

This role is based in San Francisco or NYC. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role you will

• Own FDE staffing and capacity planning, translating sales pipeline and deployment demand into hiring plans and ensuring leaders have clear visibility into tradeoffs, resourcing gaps, and delivery risk.

• Run portfolio planning and exec-facing reporting, ensuring clear visibility into priorities, capacity, risks, and decisions needed.

• Identify execution risks across active deployments and drive the decisions needed to keep work moving, ensuring clear ownership, dependencies, and critical path.

• Codify patterns from FDE deployments into reusable playbooks that accelerate ramp time and improve execution consistency across engagements.

• Identify and resolve emerging operational bottlenecks as FDE scales, implementing lightweight systems that improve execution without adding unnecessary overhead.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Bring 6+ years in technical program management, engineering operations, business operations, or similar operator roles supporting technical teams in fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments.

• Have built 0→1 operating mechanisms that scaled a technical team through rapid growth.

• Bring alignment to conflicting priorities and resource tradeoffs, driving teams toward measurable outcomes at pace.

• Break down ambiguous operational challenges into clear workstreams, anticipate risks early, and make sound decisions under pressure while balancing speed with long-term system health.

• Communicate clearly across engineering, product, GTM, and executive audiences, simplifying complexity and translating tradeoffs into actionable decisions.

• Influence senior leaders without formal authority, aligning teams with different incentives around clear, shared outcomes.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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