About the Team
OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team turns research breakthroughs into production-grade systems. We embed deeply with customers to solve high-leverage problems and act as the delivery engine for our most complex large-scale engagements. We move quickly from prototype to production and surface reusable patterns that shape our platform. We operate at the intersection of deployment and development – working closely with OpenAI Research, Product and Partnerships.
About the Role
As a Strategic Delivery Lead (SDL), you will define how OpenAI orchestrates complex, multi‑workstream customer programs end‑to‑end. Expect urgency to be high and ambiguity to be the default. You will own the plan, governance, and value realization - translating executive‑level business outcomes into a delivery roadmap, running day‑to‑day execution across FDEs, Researchers, Product, Partnerships, and customer teams, and ensuring adoption lands in production. You will map problems, structure delivery, and keep teams moving—holding the bar on both quality and pace.
You will be accountable for the success of the overall program - sequencing work, aligning stakeholders, managing risk/change control, and making the trade‑offs that protect the critical path. You’ll engage pre‑close to shape scope, milestones, resourcing, and acceptance criteria, then lead post‑close execution to measurable value. You’ll also ensure field insights are captured and fed back to Product and Research so patterns harden into platform capabilities.
You’ll coordinate and leverage a cross‑functional bench that includes FDEs, Technical Deployment Leads (TDLs), Researchers, and Partnerships - effectively influencing without formal authority.
Success will be measured first and foremost by impact - time‑to‑first value, production adoption against clear acceptance criteria, and executive‑level outcomes realized.
This is a high‑trust, high‑autonomy role. Success requires deep transformation program leadership, executive presence, and an ability to bring structure to ambiguity while keeping pace high.
This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. This role requires 25-50% travel.
In this role, you will:
- **Own strategic delivery for complex, multi‑track programs. **Act as the single accountable DRI overseeing program success. Translate business objectives into a roadmap with milestones, dependencies, acceptance criteria, and value KPIs.
- Run day‑to‑day program execution. Sequence and unblock work across FDE, Research, Product, Partnerships, and customer teams. Operate robust program management processes.
- Protect the critical path. Identify delivery risks early and work cross-functionally to mitigate blockers and maintain program velocity.
- Own executive communication and alignment. Set the narrative, run SteerCos and decision-ready readouts, surface risks early, and have the hard conversations to protect the critical path. Leverage your technical fluency to crisply articulate technical details to executives.
- Engage pre‑close to de‑risk delivery. Co‑lead discovery; shape scope and commercials; design the delivery plan and acceptance criteria; validate resourcing and risks.
- Drive adoption and change management. Embed with customer stakeholders to map workflows, land production deployments, and ensure onboarding, training, and operating models support sustained use.
- Codify patterns and playbooks. Extract reusable solution patterns and package field signal into pattern cards and product requests; shorten time‑to‑value on future deployments.
- Own value cases and ROI. Set impact hypotheses, baselines, and KPIs; run pre‑/post‑measurement; report outcomes to executive sponsors and align on expansion.
You’ll thrive in this role if you:
- **Own end-to-end strategic deployments. **10+ years leading multi-workstream technical programs and 5+ years steering C-suite governance in a consulting role or a comparable leadership position in a technology company - taking technical initiatives from problem framing through production and adoption.
- Orchestrate multidisciplinary teams. Comfortable leading engineers, researchers, product, and partnerships; you create crisp roles, decision paths, and interfaces that keep pace high and blockers few.
- Bring structure to ambiguity. You quickly untangle complexity, apply logical framing, and communicate options clearly - balancing near-term delivery with a strategic view of the big picture.
- **Bring technical fluency to exercise technical judgment. **You understand core LLM solution patterns and integration fundamentals and use that fluency to pressure-test architectures and plans, surface risks and dependencies, make scope/speed/quality trade-offs, and ensure the path to production is feasible and value-aligned.
- Translate between business and technical. You can make complex work legible to non‑technical executives and convert strategy into day‑to‑day execution plans for technical teams.
- Guide transformation with executives. You’ve partnered with the C-suite to align on vision, strategy, governance, and change management.
- Lean in on embedded execution. Willing to spend meaningful time on-site with customers (often 25–50%, sometimes higher) to unblock decisions, build trust, and accelerate adoption.
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.
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.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
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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