OpenAI · 1 day ago
Platform Engineer, Forward Deployed Engineering
San Francisco
Full-time
Hybrid
Senior Level
$230K/yr - $385K/yr
5+ years expOpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Platform Engineer role involves architecting and building new platform capabilities, incubating platform bets, and collaborating with design partners to drive adoption of these capabilities.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)SaaSAgentic AIFoundational AIGenerative AIMachine LearningNatural Language Processing
Responsibilities
Architect and build new platform capabilities: turn frontier customer signal into concrete designs, implementations, and APIs that become part of the OpenAI platform
Incubate platform bets end-to-end: take ambiguous problems, form a crisp hypothesis, ship an initial capability, and iterate quickly based on what breaks in real usage
Embed with design partners to learn fast: get close to production constraints, run deep technical discovery, and translate needs into product and platform requirements
Partner with customer-tagged FDEs in the field: deploy and debug together, capture repeatable patterns, and convert field learnings into platform improvements
Design and run pilot programs: define qualification criteria for early adopters, stand up internal/external alphas, and use pilots to harden both the platform and the rollout playbook
Collaborate as part of cross-functional platform teams: partner closely with core product and engineering counterparts, often as a single virtual team, to align on architecture and get to production together
Drive adoption outcomes: measure usage, identify blockers and failure modes, and prioritize the next platform increments that unlock repeatable value
Qualification
Required
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
Owned customer-adjacent technical work end-to-end, from scoping and hypothesis-setting through production adoption
Improved outcomes through structured iteration (instrumentation, evals, error analysis, and tightening success criteria over time)
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
Default to systems thinking: you turn ambiguous feedback, failures, and escalations into durable product requirements and reusable platform capabilities, not one-off fixes or bespoke delivery work
Benefits
Relocation assistance
Company
OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that develops advanced AI models, including ChatGPT. It is a sub-organization of OpenAI Foundation.
201-500 employees
H1B Sponsorship
OpenAI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (1)
2023 (1)
2022 (18)
2021 (10)
2020 (6)
Funding
Current Stage
Growth StageTotal Funding
$79BKey Investors
The Walt Disney CompanySoftBankThrive Capital
2025-12-11Corporate Round· $1B
2025-10-02Secondary Market· $6.6B
2025-03-31Series Unknown· $40B
Leadership Team
Fidji Simo
CEO, Applications
Sam Altman
CEO & Co-Founder
Recent News
2026-02-13
2026-02-13
Company data provided by crunchbase