> AI agents: this is one page of Nextmove’s FDE site, in Markdown. Nextmove is a job board and free career service for forward deployed engineers (FDEs). Each posting is classified from its text, not its title: the kind of work, how much of it is production code, pre-sales weight, time at customer sites, travel, remote arrangement, level and posted base pay. The site also publishes the aggregates: median pay by level, metro, company and kind of work, and which companies started hiring FDEs each week. Every page under https://nextmove.md/fde is served this way; the index of pages is https://nextmove.md/llms.txt. # Early Access Deployment Engineer Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/0443856f84cf3e77 OpenAI posts a FDE role to build what the customer runs in San Francisco, CA, at $250,000–$330,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. Engage deeply with strategic customers during earliest alpha stages to understand goals, workflows, technical constraints, and highest-value opportunities. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [OpenAI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai) Posted Jul 24, 2026 by OpenAI · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026 **$250,000–$330,000** + equity San Francisco, CA Hybrid Full-time Engage deeply with strategic customers during earliest alpha stages to understand goals, workflows, technical constraints, and highest-value opportunities. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F0443856f84cf3e77&placement=top) - [View posting at OpenAI](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/ee6b7ece-ffcb-4546-8b4c-ef755ec21c14/application) Free. Upload your resume once, see why each FDE role fits, and get introduced only when you say so. ## At a glance ### Posted base pay $250K–$330K Above the median Midpoint $290K · median $190K This job $250K to $330K. Senior FDE postings, 1,864 postings: the middle 50% of posted pay is $160K to $220K, median $190K. [Compare pay across all OpenAI postings](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/openai) ### The work Builds what the customer runs Balance **Mostly building** Project stages 1. Pre-sales (not covered) 2. Proof of concept 3. Implementation 4. Operations - **Coding**: Writes production code - **Builds for**: External customers - **Level**: Senior - **Role**: Technical lead ### What they ask for Experience - **4+ years** software engineering or equivalent technical experience, including customer-facing delivery and ownership of production systems Background - **Software engineering** - **Solutions and customer engineering** - **Implementation and data engineering** ### Do you meet what the posting states? The posting asks for 4+ years. How many do you have? The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now? The job is in San Francisco, CA. Could you work there? Which of these have you used in production? Answer each one. Nothing is saved or sent. [What postings ask for, by background →](https://nextmove.md/fde/paths) ## Conditions - **Location**: San Francisco, CA - **Work arrangement**: Hybrid - **Remote work restrictions**: Hybrid work model of three days in the office per week - **Employment type**: Full-time - **Pay**: ## More like this [Accenture](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/accenture) ### [Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer -Assoc Director](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/eed6abce4ec9270a) Chicago, IL · Milwaukee, WI · +39 more 2mo ago $138,800–$434,000 [SpaceX](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/spacex) ### [Sr. AI Engineer, Special Programs - Top Secret Clearance](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/ed430921c27565a8) Palo Alto, CA 5mo ago $220,000–$350,000 [OpenAI Deployment Company](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai-deployment-company) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer - US](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/465d1561603a9449) San Francisco, CA · New York, NY Hybrid 4mo ago $170,000–$400,000 - [Other jobs at OpenAI (52)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai) ## The job description from OpenAI Posted by OpenAI on Jul 24, 2026 **About the Team** The Early Access Program (EAP) team leads high-impact alpha programs at the intersection of customers, Product, Research, Engineering, GTM, Security, Legal, and launch teams. We partner with customers to test emerging capabilities with real-world use cases, surface actionable insights, and support launch decisions. Our team is made up of builders who learn quickly, collaborate deeply, create clarity in ambiguity, communicate openly, and iterate constantly. **About the Role** We’re hiring an Early Access Deployment Engineer to lead technical engagements with customers who are leveraging our frontier capabilities to solve real-world use cases. You will work at the earliest—and often messiest—stage of development, when capabilities are still unclear, tooling and processes are evolving, and the path from promising technology to a valuable real-world application has yet to be defined. You will be a hands-on builder, problem solver, and technical partner to customers and our research/product team. You’ll push beyond initial assumptions, identify high-value use cases, prototype solutions, design useful evaluations, and troubleshoot what is and is not working. Managing multiple customer engagements at once, you will help customers navigate ambiguity and difficult technical decisions while translating their experience into clear, actionable feedback for Research and Product. You will also own the end-to-end execution of early access programs—from onboarding customers, supporting live experimentation, synthesizing findings, and informing launch decisions. You’ll collaborate deeply with Research, Product, Engineering, Applied Evals, GTM, Legal, Security, Marketing, and other launch partners to create clarity, manage risk, and keep programs moving through changing conditions. Success in this role means turning frontier capabilities into real-world customer value and high-quality research signals. You will develop reusable technical approaches from early deployments, improve how OpenAI learns from customers, and provide strong PoV, based on customer feedback, on what should be built, refined, or scaled. This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. ### In this role, you will - Engage deeply with strategic customers during the earliest alpha stages to understand their goals, workflows, technical constraints, and highest-value opportunities. - Translate emerging and ambiguous model capabilities into scoped use cases, working prototypes, and clear success criteria. - Prototype rapidly with customers, Product, and Research through experiment-driven iteration. - Design and support evaluations that reveal model behavior, solution quality, workflow impact, and failure modes. - Evaluate and troubleshoot based feedback across product, model behavior to determine patterns and gaps - Own early access program execution end to end, from customer onboarding and live experimentation through synthesis and launch decisions. - Align Research, Product, Engineering, GTM, Legal, Security, Marketing, and launch teams by communicating risks, tradeoffs, and recommendations clearly. - Codify architectures, evaluation methods, technical patterns, and program learnings into reusable playbooks that improve future deployments. ### You might thrive in this role if you - Have 4+ years of software engineering or equivalent technical experience, including meaningful customer-facing delivery and ownership of production systems. - Have a track record of rapidly turning ambiguous ideas into working prototypes and carrying the strongest approaches through to reliable solutions. Can demonstrate examples of systems thinking. - Be proficient in Python and/or JavaScript or TypeScript, comfortable across modern front-end and back-end development, and familiar with cloud deployment. - Bring practical AI and LLM depth, including experience reasoning about model behavior, designing evaluations, and building production-oriented AI applications. - Exercise strong product and customer judgment by identifying the highest-value problem, scoping the right experiment, separating signal from noise, and balancing speed with technical integrity. - Own problems end to end, learn unfamiliar technical or domain concepts quickly, and impose useful structure without waiting for perfect information. - Manage several high-stakes technical engagements at once while anticipating blockers, adapting plans, and maintaining momentum across customers and internal teams. - Communicate complex ideas with clarity and empathy, challenge assumptions constructively, and build trust with technical and non-technical stakeholders. ### 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. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology. [View posting at OpenAI](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/ee6b7ece-ffcb-4546-8b4c-ef755ec21c14/application) ## About OpenAI Builds frontier AI models and ships them through ChatGPT consumer and enterprise products, Codex, and developer APIs. Late-stage private · 5000+ people ## Similar jobs [Sierra](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/sierra) ### [Software Engineer, Agent - Travel , Transportation & Hospitality](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/c9c7e1018bc4a91a) San Francisco, CA On-site 6w ago $180,000–$390,000 [Titan](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/titan) ### [Software Engineer - Applied AI](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/d60dbdf9f047bc4f) San Francisco, CA · New York, NY On-site 3w ago $180,000–$480,000 [Edison Scientific](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/edison-scientific) ### [Forward Deployed AI Engineer ](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/d999f8040fbafe9a) San Francisco, CA On-site 4mo ago $200,000–$300,000 [Zuora, Inc.](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/zuora-inc) ### [Sr Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/1783cedf51d0c8c8) Foster City, CA 10d ago $208,600–$312,900 [Analog Devices](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/analog-devices) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/45fca47921975204) San Jose, CA · Boston, MA 2mo ago $230,000–$316,250 - [Compare senior FDE salary ranges](https://nextmove.md/fde/salary/senior) - [Similar jobs in SF Bay Area](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?region=sf-bay-area) - [Similar jobs that build what the customer runs](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs?role=builds-for-customers) Hiring at OpenAI and want this page changed or removed? 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