Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering - London

About the team

Open AI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems.

We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development.

About the role

As an FDE manager, you’ll lead FDEs through high‑stakes, ambiguous customer deployments and own technical and business value outcomes end to end.

You’ll grow a team that can operate under pressure and help Open AI learn from the field.

You’ll partner closely with Product, Research, Sales, and GTM to ensure fieldwork informs roadmap priorities, drives new exploration, and supports safe deployment at scale.

Your decisions will influence how Open AI is trusted by the customers closest to our deployment work.

Your success will be measured by how consistently your team ships, how clearly you deliver signal to Research and Product, and how durable your team and delivery model prove to be.

This role is based in London. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week, offer relocation assistance, and require travel up to 25% of the time.

Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a team of FDEs delivering production systems with frontier models.
• Own end‑to‑end delivery outcomes through clarity, speed, tight coordination, and technical quality.
• Codify what works into tools, playbooks, and roadmap inputs that create leverage for both Open AI and our wider developer community.
• Notice early indicators and raise them with urgency, whether in product behavior, customer environments, or delivery practices.
• Use judgement to distinguish what requires action and what does not.
• Set a high bar for FDE performance and support each person’s growth through direct, actionable feedback.
• Define how we staff and support field teams that can scale without added complexity.
• Translate field experience into sharp, actionable feedback for Product and Research.
• Build deep trust with your team by modeling calm, focus, and judgment when it matters most.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of engineering or technical delivery experience, including 2+ years managing high‑performing FDE or customer‑facing engineers.
• Led high‑pressure technical projects from prototype to production.
• Write and review production‑grade code across frontend and backend using Java Script or Python.
• Simplify complex work and make fast, sound decisions under pressure.
• Elevate team performance through clarity, not process.
• Operate with urgency in ambiguous or evolving environments.
• About Open AI

Open AI 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.

Equal Opportunity and Legal Statements

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.

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 U.

S.‑based candidates.

For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers, we believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with certain job duties; therefore, all applicants will be considered in light of these duties and applicable statutes.

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