OpenAI FDE
Early Access Deployment Engineer
- Location San Francisco
- Compensation 250,000 – 330,000 USD / year
- Type FullTime
- Team Go To Market
- Seniority mid
- Posted 2026-07-24
Original posting ↗ You apply on the company site — we never collect applications.
Extracted automatically from public job postings. Always verify details on the original posting before applying.
role details
Engage with customers during alpha stages to understand their goals and workflows, and translate emerging model capabilities into scoped use cases.
Summary generated by AI from the original posting.
Hard requirements to check first
- Clearance:not mentioned in the posting
- Work auth:not mentioned in the posting
- Travel:customer-facing; travel not stated
Skills
PythonTypeScriptJavaScriptEvalsproblem solvingprototype designevaluation designtechnical partnershipcustomer navigationambiguity managementtechnical executioncustomer feedback synthesis
Excerpt from the original posting
About the Team The Early Access Program (EAP) team leads high-impact alpha programs at the intersection of customers, Product, Research, Engineering, GTM, Security, Legal, and launch teams. We partner with customers to test emerging capabilities with real-world use cases, surface actionable insights, and support launch decisions. Our team is made up of builders who learn quickly, collaborate deeply, create clarity in ambiguity, communicate openly, and iterate constantly. About the Role We’re hiring an Early Access Deployment Engineer to lead technical engagements with customers who are leveraging our frontier capabilities to solve real-world use cases. You will work at the earliest—and often messiest—stage of development, when capabilities are still unclear, tooling and processes are evolving, and the path from promising technology to a valuable real-world application has yet to be defined. You will be a hands-on builder, problem solver, and technical partner to customers and our research/product team. You’ll push beyond initial assumptions, identify high-value use cases, prototype solutions, design useful evaluations, and troubleshoot what is and is not working. Managing multiple customer engagements at once, you will help customers navigate ambiguity and difficult technical decisions while translating their experience into clear, actionable feedback for Research and Product. You will also own the end-to-end execution of early access programs—from onboarding customers, supporting live experimentation, synthesizing findings, and informing launch decisions. You’ll collaborate deeply with Research, Product, Engineering, Applied Evals, GTM, Legal, Security, Marketing, and other launch partners to create clarity, manage risk, and keep programs moving through changing conditions. Success in this role means turning frontier capabilities into real-world customer value and high-quality research signals. You will develop reusable technical approaches from early deployments, improve how OpenAI learns from customers, and provide strong PoV, based on customer feedback, on what should be built, refined, or scaled. This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: - Engage deeply with strategic customers during the earliest alpha stages to understand their goals, workflows, technical constraints, and highest-value opportunities. - Translate em…
Verify before you apply
Before you apply
- 157 FDE roles in San Francisco — every role we track in this city, refreshed daily
- What these roles pay — 223 postings with published pay — midpoint median $231,000
- Market report — how all 922 live roles break down, with sample size and method
- Career path — what changes in scope between FDE levels