Platform Engineering Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE)

About the team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) org sits at the intersection of product, engineering, research, and go-to-market. We take frontier platform capabilities into the real world with design partners, turning raw customer signal into shipped software, repeatable patterns, and durable products. The FDE Platform team is primarily a leverage function that scales the FDE org’s impact to OpenAI’s platform and products. We provide hands-on leverage by embedding with customer-tagged FDE pods to aid in architecting, product shaping, refactoring, and building. This team is perfect for highly collaborative software engineers who love innovating on cutting-edge products with other builders. About the role As the Engineering Manager for Platform FDE, you will lead a small team that acts as a multiplier for the broader FDE org. Your mandate is to increase the rate at which customer-grounded ideas become durable, generalizable platform bets, by providing hands-on product and engineering leverage to customer-tagged pods. You will partner with customer-tagged FDEs who are driving delivery and customer outcomes, and embed Platform FDE capacity where they can provide the highest leverage. In practice that means working in the trenches on architecture, product shaping, refactoring, hardening, and reusable abstractions, while preserving the pod’s ownership of customer understanding and day-to-day execution. You will also collaborate closely with our B2B Platform Team and other long-term owners to align early on what should generalize, what should remain customer-specific, and what “ready for handoff” looks like. This role requires a combination of engineering leadership and strong product-oriented judgment. You will manage a focused portfolio of platform incubation work with explicit hypotheses, success criteria, and measurable adoption outcomes, and you will be accountable for translating deployment signal into reusable capabilities that can be handed off cleanly to long-term owners. You will be expected to lead through influence across multiple stakeholders, uphold a high technical bar, and establish clear responsibility boundaries between your team, customer pods, and partner organizations. This role is based in San Francisco and is not a travel role. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. Travel is optional-by-project and typically