- New York postings lean towards regulated customers, with launch controls, audit artifacts and acceptance thresholds in the job text.
- The Bay Area list spans on-site enterprise AI work and roles remote across the US and Canada, so the arrangement is the variable.
- A regulated customer setting, the seniority and the office schedule each change the commitment behind a role.
- Compare the posted ranges on the New York salary page and the Bay Area salary page.
What the postings ask engineers to do
OpenAI's financial-services FDE role is in the New York metro list. It joins discovery and scoping to production delivery for banks, asset managers and insurers, and names launch controls, audit artifacts, evaluation, acceptance thresholds and post-production adoption. It is hybrid with three office days a week.
Other Bay Area postings describe different operating conditions. 11x's FDE role describes full-stack systems for AI voice agents and production operation, remote across the US and Canada with an in-office option in San Francisco. Handshake's senior enterprise-AI role is on-site and focuses on enterprise customer workflows, production AI applications, agent evaluation and reusable deployment practices.
Start with the employer's stated location and work arrangement, then compare the customer audience, the point in the deployment lifecycle you would own, the required experience and the travel language. Where a posting says nothing about sponsorship or travel, treat it as unknown and ask.