Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Financial Services (AI)

Location: New York City, United States; hybrid work with 3 days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is available, and travel up to 50% may be required.

Salary: $185K–$300K plus equity

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company building and safely deploying general-purpose artificial intelligence systems.

What you will do

• Design and ship production AI systems for financial workflows, owning integrations, data flows, reliability, observability, and on-call readiness.
• Lead discovery and scoping from pre-sales through post-production, translating ambiguous customer problems into requirements and measurable delivery plans.
• Define launch criteria for regulated environments, including controls, audit artifacts, evaluation benchmarks, and risk- and performance-based acceptance thresholds.
• Build systems for sensitive data environments with access controls, data lineage, explainability, and documented failure modes.
• Run workflow-specific evaluations covering accuracy, latency, coverage, and false positives, using results to drive iteration.
• Turn deployment learnings into reference architectures, playbooks, tooling, and feedback for product, model, and platform improvements.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software engineering, ML engineering, or technical deployment experience with customer-facing ownership in financial services or adjacent regulated industries.
• End-to-end ownership of complex AI or data-driven systems from scoping through production adoption, where errors have financial or regulatory consequences.
• Experience with financial workflows such as research, trading, risk, compliance, underwriting, operations, or investment processes.
• Ability to write and review production-grade code across backend and frontend systems using Python, JavaScript, or comparable stacks.
• Experience deploying LLM- or generative-model-powered systems, including understanding of model behavior, evaluation, and guardrails.
• Clear communication across engineering, product, risk, compliance, and executive stakeholders, including translating technical trade-offs into decision quality and risk posture.
• Systems thinking and high execution standards, including converting incidents, escalations, and failures into improved operating standards and repeatable deployment patterns.
• Ability to remain calm and decisive during urgent, ambiguous, and high-stakes delivery.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work model with 3 office days per week in New York City.
• Travel of up to 50% may be required.
• Relocation assistance is offered.
• Equity is included in the compensation package.
• Equal opportunity employment and reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities.
• Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.