Infrastructure Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering

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

• Build and lead the FDE Infra function from scratch, setting the operating model, near-term roadmap, hiring plan, and team development for the first infrastructure engineers.

• Operate as a player-coach: own architecture patterns, review core modules, and step into complex deployment, security, or customer escalation work when needed.

• Define and evolve reusable deployment baselines for single-tenant FDE applications across provisioning, networking, identity and authentication, deployment workflows, observability, vulnerability management, and customer connectivity.

• Guide deployment strategy across OpenAI-hosted and customer-hosted environments, helping FDE pods choose when to standardize, when to adapt, and how to execute safely.

• Partner closely with OpenAI’s core infrastructure, Security, Privacy, and AppSec teams to keep deployments aligned with internal standards while maintaining accountability for successful outcomes.

• Engage directly with customer-side technical and security stakeholders, and turn repeated deployment pain into shared modules, runbooks, and vetted patterns that improve speed and reliability across FDE.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Bring 8+ years of engineering experience, including 2+ years managing strong individual contributors, with depth in infrastructure, platform, reliability, or security-heavy systems.

• Have strong hands-on infrastructure judgment across cloud environments, networking, infrastructure-as-code, deployment systems, observability, and security controls, including identity and authentication patterns.

• Have 0→1 experience building reusable capabilities under ambiguity, and can make disciplined standardization-versus-customization calls instead of defaulting to bespoke work.

• Communicate clearly across engineers, security specialists, and senior external stakeholders, and can explain infrastructure and security tradeoffs without losing precision.

• Prefer player-coach leadership and know how to build a small, high-leverage team through direct technical involvement, strong hiring, inclusive management, and clear execution mechanisms.

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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