Early Access Deployment Engineer
Lead technical engagements with customers in OpenAI's Early Access Program. Prototype solutions, design evaluations, troubleshoot frontier AI capabilities, and translate customer feedback into actionable insights for Research and Product teams. Requires 4+ years software engineering experience with AI/LLM depth and strong customer-facing skills.
About the job
Responsibilities
- 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 on feedback across product and 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.
Requirements
- 4+ years of software engineering or equivalent technical experience, including meaningful customer-facing delivery and ownership of production systems.
- Track record of rapidly turning ambiguous ideas into working prototypes and carrying the strongest approaches through to reliable solutions. Demonstrated systems thinking.
- Proficient in Python and/or JavaScript or TypeScript, comfortable across modern front-end and back-end development, and familiar with cloud deployment.
- Practical AI and LLM depth, including experience reasoning about model behavior, designing evaluations, and building production-oriented AI applications.
- 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.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience developing reusable technical approaches from early deployments.
- Ability to improve how the company learns from customers and provide strong point of view based on customer feedback on what should be built, refined, or scaled.
Skills
Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Frontend Development, Backend Development, Cloud Deployment, AI, LLMs, Prototyping, Evaluations, Systems Thinking
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