OpenAI hiring Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering - Munich • Remote (Work from Home) | Himalayas
OpenAIOP

Manager, Forward Deployed Engineering - Munich

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

OpenAI

Employee count: 201-500

Germany only

About the team
OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team partners with our customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We embed with users to solve high-leverage problems, move fast from prototype to deployment, and surface reusable patterns that shape our platform. We operate at the intersection of field delivery and internal development, working closely with Product, Research, and Go-To-Market (GTM).

About the role
As a foundational FDE manager, you’ll lead FDE through high-stakes, ambiguous customer deployments and own technical and business value outcomes end to end. You’ll grow a team that can operate under pressure and help OpenAI learn from the field.

You’ll partner closely with Product, Research, Sales, and GTM to ensure fieldwork informs roadmap priorities, drives new exploration, and supports safe deployment at scale. Your decisions will influence how OpenAI is trusted by the customers closest to our deployment work. Your success will be measured by how consistently your team ships, how clearly you deliver signal to Research and Product, and how durable your team and delivery model prove to be.

This role is based in Munich. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. This role also will require travel up to 25%.

In this role you will

  • Lead and grow a team of FDE delivering production systems with frontier models

  • Own end-to-end delivery outcomes through clarity, speed, tight coordination, and technical quality

  • Codify what works into tools, playbooks, and roadmap inputs that create leverage for both OpenAI and our wider developer community

  • Notice early indicators and raise them with urgency, whether in product behavior, customer environments, or delivery practices

  • Use judgement to distinguish what requires action and what does not

  • Set a high bar for FDE performance and support each person’s growth through direct, actionable feedback

  • Define how we staff and support field teams that can scale without added complexity

You might thrive in this role if you

  • Bring 8+ years of engineering or technical delivery experience, including 2+ years managing high-performing FDE or customer-facing engineers

  • Have led high-pressure technical projects from prototype to production

  • Write and review production-grade code across frontend and backend using Javascript or Python

  • Simplify complex work and make fast, sound decisions under pressure

  • Elevate team performance through clarity, not process

  • Operate with urgency in ambiguous or evolving environments

  • Translate field experience into sharp, actionable feedback for Product and Research

  • Build deep trust with your team by modeling calm, focus, and judgment when it matters most

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

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.

About the job

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Posted on

Job type

Full Time

Experience level

Manager

Location requirements

Hiring timezones

Germany +/- 0 hours

About OpenAI

Learn more about OpenAI and their company culture.

View company profile

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.

Developing safe and beneficial AI systems requires people from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. We’re always looking for curious minds to join our team.

The development of AI must be carried out with a knowledge of and respect for the perspectives and experiences that represent the full spectrum of humanity.

Core values

  • AGI focus: We are committed to building safe, beneficial AGI that will have a massive positive impact on humanity's future. Anything that doesn’t help with that is out of scope.

  • Intense and scrappy: Building something exceptional requires hard work (often on unglamorous stuff) and urgency; everything (that we choose to do) is important. Be unpretentious and do what works; find the best ideas wherever they come from.

  • Scale: We believe that scale—in our models, our systems, ourselves, our processes, and our ambitions—is magic. When in doubt, scale it up.

  • Make something people love: Our technology and products should have a transformatively positive effect on people’s lives.

  • Team spirit: Our biggest advances, and differentiation, come from effective collaboration in and across teams. Although our teams have increasingly different identities and priorities, the overall purpose and goals have to remain perfectly aligned. Nothing is someone else’s problem.

Employee benefits

Learn about the employee benefits and perks provided at OpenAI.

View benefits

Flexible Spending Accounts

OpenAI offers flexible spending accounts for healthcare and dependent care expenses.

Life & AD&D Insurance

Employees receive life insurance and accidental death & dismemberment (AD&D) coverage.

401(k) with Matching

OpenAI provides a 401(k) with generous matching, helping employees save for retirement.

Conference Budget

Employees have a budget for attending domestic conferences, fostering professional growth.

View OpenAI's employee benefits
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OpenAI

Company size

201-500 employees

Founded in

2015

Chief executive officer

Sam Altman

View company profile

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