---
title: 'Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Legal-SF at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/forward-deployed-engineer-fde-legal-sf-openai-new-york-v56k07vnvym6'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-10'
---

# Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Legal-SF at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Compensation:** $185k–$300k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-27
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-10
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/832094fd-4d89-4fe4-bc18-9ba88d347a18

## Job description

## About the team

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

## About the role

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to build and deploy AI systems for legal work. You will embed deeply with customers—often working closely with senior legal practitioners—to identify the right first use case, rapidly prototype a solution, and prove measurable value. Early engagements may focus on creating a “hero” workflow that shows how OpenAI’s models can support legal analysis, drafting, research, or real-time work with complex case records. You will own the technical work from discovery and proof of concept through production adoption, while translating customer workflows and constraints into clear product feedback. As the motion matures, you will turn successful deployments into repeatable patterns that can scale across larger accounts and the broader legal market. This role is based in San Francisco or New York City. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance. Travel up to 50% may be required.

In this role, you will

- Embed with law firms and legal teams to understand their workflows, identify high-value opportunities, and select the right initial use cases to prove value.
- Build full-stack systems that deliver customer value and sharpen how we learn
- Embed closely with customer teams, understand their needs, and guide adoption of what you build
- Make trade-offs between scope, speed, and quality; adjust plans to protect delivery
- Contribute directly in the code when progress or clarity depends on it
- Codify working patterns into tools, playbooks, or building blocks that others can use
- Share field feedback that helps Research and Product understand where the models succeed and where they can improve

You might thrive in this role if you

- Bring 5+ years of software engineering, ML engineering, or technical deployment experience with customer-facing ownership in financial services or adjacent regulated industries.
- Have experience with legal technology, legal services, compliance-heavy workflows, or professional services; this is helpful but not required.
- Have owned complex AI or data-driven systems end-to-end, from scoping through production adoption, in environments where errors carry real financial or regulatory consequences.
- Write and review production-grade code across backend and frontend systems using Python, JavaScript, or comparable stacks.
- Have deployed systems powered by LLMs or generative models and understand how model behavior, evaluation, and guardrails affect user trust and business outcomes.
- Communicate clearly across engineering, product, risk, compliance, and executive stakeholders, translating technical trade-offs into decision quality and risk posture.
- Apply systems thinking with high execution standards, turning incidents, escalations, and failures into improved operating standards and repeatable deployment patterns.
- Stay calm and decisive when delivery is urgent, ambiguous, and high-stakes.

## 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](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). 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](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). 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](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) 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 OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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