Infrastructure Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering
OpenAI•New York, England, UK
fulltime
Engineering and Information Technology
8+ years
About The Team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) org sits at the intersection of product, engineering, research, and go-to-market. We take new capabilities into real customer deployments, turning deployment signal into shipped software, repeatable patterns, and durable product improvements.
The FDE Infra team is a small leverage function within FDE that helps customer-tagged FDE pods deploy and operate single-tenant applications reliably. We build reusable, security-conscious infrastructure baselines and provide hands-on support where deployments are more complex. The team supports both OpenAI-hosted and customer-hosted deployments, with a bias toward standardizing on OpenAI-hosted where that is the right operational choice.
About The Role As the Engineering Manager for FDE Infra, you will lead a small team that acts as a multiplier for the broader FDE org. Your mandate is to improve the speed, quality, and operational reliability of FDE deployments by building reusable infrastructure patterns and supporting customer-tagged pods where infra work is most critical.
You will partner with customer-tagged FDEs who are driving delivery and customer outcomes, and direct FDE Infra capacity where it provides the highest leverage. In practice that means working in the trenches on provisioning, networking, identity and authentication, deployment workflows, observability, customer connectivity, and security posture, while preserving the pod’s ownership of the customer relationship and day-to-day execution.
This role requires a combination of engineering leadership and strong infrastructure judgment. You will operate as a player-coach, build the FDE Infra function from scratch, and help the org make disciplined tradeoffs between standardization and customization across OpenAI-hosted and customer-hosted deployments. You will be expected to lead through influence across customer pods and partner teams, uphold a high technical bar, and maintain accountability for successful deployment outcomes while coordinating closely with OpenAI’s core infrastructure, Security, Privacy, and AppSec teams.
This role is based in San Francisco, New York City, or London and is not a travel role. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance.
In this role you will
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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.
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