Job Overview

OpenAI is seeking a Platform Engineer within the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) organization. This role is perfect for highly collaborative software engineers who love innovating on cutting-edge products with other builders.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide hands-on leverage to customer pods: embed with customer-tagged FDE teams to support generalization, contributing directly in architecture, product shaping, refactoring, and implementation.


• Turn repeated signals into platform bets: translate cross-customer patterns into crisp hypotheses with clear success criteria, scope, and a validation plan that fits real account constraints.


• Raise the engineering bar through tooling and mentorship: set org-wide quality norms through high-signal code review and pairing, and build lightweight developer tooling that makes good architecture, readability, and correctness the default across FDE.


• Collaborate as part of cross-functional platform teams: partner closely with B2B Product, customer-tagged FDEs, ops, and business partners to bring the right products and platform capabilities to market.


• Lead complex platform capabilities end-to-end when needed: for high-leverage primitives like our Context Platform, act as DRI from requirements through implementation, make key tradeoffs explicit, and pull in customer pods early to keep the work grounded in real deployments.

Required Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering or ML engineering experience with a track record of shipping 0→1 capabilities that other engineers or customers depend on.


• Experience in high-ambiguity, fast-iteration environments (startups or product-centric teams) is a plus.


• Have owned customer-adjacent technical work end-to-end, from scoping and hypothesis-setting through production adoption, and improved outcomes through structured iteration (instrumentation, evals, error analysis, and tightening success criteria over time).


• Have built or operated systems where reliability, security, and governance materially shaped design (permissions/RBAC, auditability, data access boundaries, rollout safety, observability, and incident-driven hardening).


• Communicate clearly across engineering, product, go-to-market, and executive audiences, simplifying complex ideas and translating technical tradeoffs into adoption impact, sequencing decisions, and measurable outcomes.

About OpenAI

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.

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