Platform Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) · OpenAI

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 22:16:31 GMT
Engineering

OpenAI · San Francisco · $302K – $335K · hybrid

Compensation

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) org sits at the intersection of product, engineering, research, and go-to-market. We take frontier platform capabilities into the real world with design partners, turning raw customer signal into shipped software, repeatable patterns, and durable products.

About the role

As the Engineering Manager for Platform FDE, you will lead a small team that acts as a multiplier for the broader FDE org. 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 who are driving delivery and customer outcomes, and embed Platform FDE capacity where they can provide the highest leverage. In practice that means working in the trenches on architecture, product shaping, refactoring, hardening, and reusable abstractions, while preserving the pod’s ownership of customer understanding and day-to-day execution. You will also collaborate closely with our 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.

In this role you will

Guide a focused portfolio of platform bets: Steer direction for a small number of high-signal problems, with clear hypotheses, success criteria, sequencing, and measurable adoption outcomes.

Build and validate with customers: Ensure the team ships working software with design partners, instruments usage and outcomes, and iterates quickly based on real-world adoption and constraints.

Co-develop with long-term owners: Partner early with B2B Platform (and other durable owners) to align on architecture, interfaces, security/governance requirements, and handoff criteria, staying engaged through validation and the path to scale.

Maintain a high engineering bar: Set and enforce standards for design, code quality, testing, observability, and operational readiness appropriate for enterprise use.

Grow and develop the team: Coach and develop engineers through direct feedback, clear expectations, and durable team mechanisms that reinforce execution and ownership.

Operate with high judgment and influence: Make clear tradeoffs under ambiguity, communicate decisions crisply across stakeholders, and drive outcomes through partnership rather than formal authority.

You might thrive in this role if you

Bring 8+ years of engineering experience, including 2+ years managing high-performance engineers

Are deeply customer-obsessed and can partner credibly with senior stakeholders while keeping a high bar for delivery and technical rigor

Naturally act as a shepherd: you elevate and refine others’ ideas, sharpen hypotheses, and make disciplined “scale vs pause” calls with clear reasoning

Excel at cross-functional execution, forming tight partnerships with engineering, product, research, and GTM teams to deliver outcomes without needing formal authority

Can build inclusive team mechanics – rotations, mentorship, and scoped ownership – that increase collaboration across teams rather than creating a gated platform group