Strategy and Operations, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) · OpenAI

Fri, 24 Apr 2026 12:19:06 GMT
Engineering

OpenAI · San Francisco · $216K – $240K • Offers Equity · hybrid

Compensation

$216K – $240K • Offers Equity

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts

Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)

401(k) retirement plan with employer match

Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)

Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees

13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)

Mental health and wellness support

Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage

Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth

Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible

Relocation support for eligible employees

Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

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 Strategy and 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, you’ll 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.

In this role you will

Own FDE capacity planning, translating pipeline and active project demand into hiring forecasts.

Run the operating rhythm across portfolio reviews and quarterly planning, ensuring leaders have visibility into priorities, risk, dependencies, and the decisions needed to keep execution moving.

Determine how customer engagements should be staffed across FDE and partner channels, working with GTM and FDE leadership to make explicit tradeoff calls based on scope, strategic value, and capacity constraints.

Codify and evolve the FDE operating model so each subsequent deployment becomes easier to scope and deliver.

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.

Benefits

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.

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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