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 und