> 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. # Applied AI Engineer, Enterprise Canonical URL: https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/522df6273aa0eeb2 OpenAI posts a FDE role to build what the customer runs in San Francisco, CA and 1 more, at $251,000–$278,000 base, above the senior FDE median of $190,000 across 1,864 postings with pay. This role partners with enterprise organizations to design, build, evaluate, and deploy AI systems from initial use-case selection through production scale. Read from the employer’s posting on November 8, 2026. - [OpenAI](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai) Posted Jul 8, 2026 by OpenAI · open on Ashby as of Nov 8, 2026 **$251,000–$278,000** + equity San Francisco, CA +1 Hybrid Full-time This role partners with enterprise organizations to design, build, evaluate, and deploy AI systems from initial use-case selection through production scale. - [See roles that fit me](https://nextmove.md/sign-up?from=%2Ffde%2Fjobs%2F522df6273aa0eeb2&placement=top) - [View posting at OpenAI](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/01091aed-427d-4e10-8cdb-fb500cf55bb9/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 $251K–$278K Above the median Midpoint $265K · median $190K This job $251K to $278K. 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 2. Proof of concept 3. Implementation 4. Operations - **Coding**: Writes production code - **Builds for**: External customers - **Level**: Senior - **Role**: Individual contributor ### Do you meet what the posting states? The posting reads as a senior role. What level are you at now? The job is in San Francisco, CA · New York, NY. Could you work in one of these? 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 · New York, NY - **Work arrangement**: Hybrid - **Remote work restrictions**: Hybrid: 3 days in office per week; based in SF or NYC. - **Employment type**: Full-time - **Pay**: ## More like this [Accenture](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/accenture) ### [AI Forward Deployed Engineering Senior Manager | Sales ReInvention](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/16bca3048d7b55d6) Chicago, IL · Milwaukee, WI · +41 more 6w ago $112,900–$366,300 [Reducto](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/reducto) ### [Forward Deployed Engineer](https://nextmove.md/fde/jobs/5c86f9b878bf4784) San Francisco, CA On-site 5mo ago $200,000–$300,000 [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 - [Other jobs at OpenAI (52)](https://nextmove.md/fde/companies/openai) ## The job description from OpenAI Posted by OpenAI on Jul 8, 2026 ### About the Team OpenAI’s Applied AI Engineering team helps organizations turn frontier AI capabilities into safe, reliable, and high-impact production systems. We work with customer executives, product and engineeriIng teams, security leaders, and transformation teams to identify valuable opportunities, accelerate technical implementation, and scale what works. Enterprise deployments are defined by complexity rather than any one industry: existing architectures, diverse data environments, security and governance requirements, multiple stakeholder groups, and organization-wide change. We turn lessons from these deployments into better products and reusable patterns for customers everywhere. ### About the Role As an Enterprise Applied AI Engineer you will partner directly with leading organizations to design, build, and deploy AI systems that deliver measurable business outcomes. You will combine deep technical judgment, hands-on engineering, and customer leadership to take ambitious ideas from use-case selection and architecture through prototyping, evaluation, production launch, and scale. You will write and debug code, build evaluation systems, resolve complex integrations, and guide decisions involving model behavior, reliability, latency, cost, safety, security, governance, and operational readiness. Success is measured by production systems, sustained adoption, and meaningful customer impact—not simply activity or successful demonstrations. This is a rare opportunity to work on consequential real-world deployments at the frontier of AI while directly influencing how OpenAI’s products evolve. **This role is based in our SF or NYC office. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.** ### In this role, you will - Partner directly with enterprise customers to identify high-value opportunities and translate them into technical architectures, implementation plans, evaluation strategies, and measurable success criteria. - Design, build, and deploy AI systems that solve important customer problems and produce measurable business outcomes. - Work hands-on in code to build prototypes, evaluation harnesses, reference implementations, integrations, and production accelerators. - Make sound technical decisions across models, agents, retrieval, tools, data, reliability, observability, latency, cost, safety, security, and governance. - Diagnose complex implementation challenges, reproduce failures, test hypotheses, and drive blockers toward resolution. - Help customers progress from promising prototypes to reliable production systems, sustained adoption, and scaled impact. - Partner closely with customer engineering teams and OpenAI Product, Research, Engineering, Security, and go-to-market teams, translating deployment experience into high-signal product feedback. - Create reusable architectures, tooling, playbooks, and technical guidance that accelerate future enterprise deployments. ### You’ll thrive in this role if you - Have a demonstrated track record of designing, building, and delivering AI or machine-learning systems in enterprise environments, including taking systems from prototype to production. Relevant backgrounds may include applied AI or ML engineering, forward-deployed engineering, software engineering, customer engineering, solutions architecture, or technical consulting. - Can point to substantial personal contributions in code, architecture, evaluation, debugging, or production engineering—not only program or stakeholder management. - Are highly proficient in Python and comfortable working across an AI application stack; experience with JavaScript, TypeScript, or another relevant language is valuable. - Understand how to evaluate AI systems systematically using representative data, graders, production signals, and human judgment. - Have navigated enterprise production requirements such as integrations, reliability, observability, security, privacy, data governance, performance, and cost. - Can connect technical decisions to customer workflows, adoption, and measurable business outcomes. - Communicate with clarity and credibility across hands-on engineers, technical leaders, security teams, product leaders, and executives. - Bring high agency, strong technical judgment, and end-to-end ownership in ambiguous environments. - Learn quickly, challenge assumptions constructively, and collaborate with humility; experience in a particular industry or with OpenAI products is not required. ### 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/01091aed-427d-4e10-8cdb-fb500cf55bb9/application) ## About OpenAI Builds frontier AI models and ships them through ChatGPT consumer and enterprise products, Codex, and developer APIs. 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