Forward Deployed Engineer - II

About Ema Ema is building the world’s leading Agentic AI platform to transform enterprise productivity. We enable organizations to delegate repetitive tasks to Ema, the Universal AI Employee, delivering 10x gains in workforce efficiency, across functions. Founded by former executives from Google, Coinbase, Flipkart, and Okta, our team includes engineers from premier tech companies and graduates of Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, and IITs. We are backed by industry leading investors including Accel, Naspers/Prosus, Section32, and angels like Sheryl Sandberg and Dustin Moskovitz. Headquartered in Silicon Valley and with offices in London, Bangalore and Vancouver, Ema is at the frontier of what Agentic AI can do in production — we ship real systems that run real business processes at scale. The role “The ideal forward deployed builder is a composite. Not a software engineer, not a product manager, not a solutions architect or a salesperson — but able to draw on any of these to solve the customer’s problems, in the customer’s building, on the customer’s timeline, against the customer’s data.” Ema is building the Universal Agentic Control Plane — the layer where enterprises turn messy, human-run business processes into AI Employees that actually do the work. The platform is powerful. The bottleneck is people who can walk into a customer’s world, see what should be automated, and make it real. That’s this role. We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Builder to embed inside our customers and partners, find the highest-value opportunities for agentic automation, solution them, build the demo, win the deal, and then stay to implement it in production. You go in alone, Rambo in the jungle, armed with your wits, your skills, and the most powerful agentic platform on the market. We’ll train you hard before you deploy. After that, the territory is yours. This is not a support role behind an account team. You are the account team, the solutions architect, and the builder, compress

About Ema Ema is building the world’s leading Agentic AI platform to transform enterprise productivity. We enable organizations to delegate repetitive tasks to Ema, the Universal AI Employee, delivering 10x gains in workforce efficiency, across functions. Founded by former executives from Google, Coinbase, Flipkart, and Okta, our team includes engineers from premier tech companies and graduates of Stanford, MIT, UC Berkeley, CMU, and IITs. We are backed by industry leading investors including Accel, Naspers/Prosus, Section32, and angels like Sheryl Sandberg and Dustin Moskovitz. Headquartered in Silicon Valley and with offices in London, Bangalore and Vancouver, Ema is at the frontier of what Agentic AI can do in production — we ship real systems that run real business processes at scale. The role “The ideal forward deployed builder is a composite. Not a software engineer, not a product manager, not a solutions architect or a salesperson — but able to draw on any of these to solve the customer’s problems, in the customer’s building, on the customer’s timeline, against the customer’s data.” Ema is building the Universal Agentic Control Plane — the layer where enterprises turn messy, human-run business processes into AI Employees that actually do the work. The platform is powerful. The bottleneck is people who can walk into a customer’s world, see what should be automated, and make it real. That’s this role. We’re looking for a Forward Deployed Builder to embed inside our customers and partners, find the highest-value opportunities for agentic automation, solution them, build the demo, win the deal, and then stay to implement it in production. You go in alone, Rambo in the jungle, armed with your wits, your skills, and the most powerful agentic platform on the market. We’ll train you hard before you deploy. After that, the territory is yours. This is not a support role behind an account team. You are the account team, the solutions architect, and the builder, compress

About the Team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with leading semiconductor companies to deploy production-grade AI systems across the entire chip design lifecycle: design, verification, and physical design. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development, embedding deeply with customers to translate frontier model capabilities into systems that materially improve engineering workflows and accelerate innovation. Our work turns early, high-touch deployments into repeatable solution patterns, reference architectures, and evaluation practices that scale across the semiconductor ecosystem. About the Role We are seeking a highly skilled Physical Design Engineer to join our semiconductor-focused Forward Deployed Engineering team. This is a senior IC role that will begin with a strong emphasis on physical design expertise, technical judgment, advisory leverage, and customer credibility, with the expectation that the person will grow into a broader Forward Deployed Engineering role over time. In the near term, you will serve as the team’s physical design SME across semiconductor deployments: helping FDEs, Product, and Research understand backend implementation workflows, pressure-test AI-assisted solution ideas against real physical design constraints, and raise the quality of our customer-facing technical work. You will help the broader team build fluency in implementation flows, EDA tooling, signoff methodology, and the trade-offs that shape physical design decisions in practice. Over time, we expect this role to expand beyond SME support into broader FDE ownership: partnering directly with customers, shaping deployment strategy, building and iterating production-grade AI systems, driving technical workstreams, and helping turn high-touch semiconductor deployments into repeatable solutions. This is a strong fit for someone who brings deep physical design expertise today and is excited to grow into a customer-facing, syst

About the team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development. 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 New York City 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 custo

About the team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team turns research breakthroughs into production-grade systems. We embed deeply with customers to solve high-leverage problems and act as the delivery engine for our most complex large-scale engagements. We move quickly from prototype to production and surface reusable patterns that shape our platform. We operate at the intersection of deployment and development – working closely with OpenAI Research, Product and Partnerships. About the Role As a Technical Deployment Lead (TDL), you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers. You will own how they are built, shipped, and adopted. You’ll translate business outcomes into a technical plan, run day-to-day execution across FDEs, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, and partner with customer teams to ensure delivery supports their goals. You will own delivery end-to-end: embedding with customers to map workflows and success criteria, ensuring components ship on time, and leading readiness and change management for adoption. You’ll track progress, manage dependencies, make sequencing decisions, and drive 0→1 prototypes through MVP and scale. You will also share field insights with Product and Research to guide roadmap and priorities. Success will be measured first and foremost by impact - deployments that deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to their workflows. Additional measures of success include delivery reliability (milestones hit, low reopen/churn), operating leverage (patterns reused across deployments), judgment under pressure, and product impact (field signal that shifts roadmaps/architectures). This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Success requires deep technical project management expertise, extreme ownership of outcomes, and an ability to immerse in customer workflows and partner with customer teams to solve complex engineering problems at pace. This role is based in NYC. We use a hy

About the team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team turns research breakthroughs into production-grade systems. We embed deeply with customers to solve high-leverage problems and act as the delivery engine for our most complex large-scale engagements. We move quickly from prototype to production and surface reusable patterns that shape our platform. We operate at the intersection of deployment and development – working closely with OpenAI Research, Product and Partnerships. About the Role As a Technical Deployment Lead (TDL), you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers. You will own how they are built, shipped, and adopted. You’ll translate business outcomes into a technical plan, run day-to-day execution across FDEs, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, and partner with customer teams to ensure delivery supports their goals. You will own delivery end-to-end: embedding with customers to map workflows and success criteria, ensuring components ship on time, and leading readiness and change management for adoption. You’ll track progress, manage dependencies, make sequencing decisions, and drive 0→1 prototypes through MVP and scale. You will also share field insights with Product and Research to guide roadmap and priorities. Success will be measured first and foremost by impact - deployments that deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to their workflows. Additional measures of success include delivery reliability (milestones hit, low reopen/churn), operating leverage (patterns reused across deployments), judgment under pressure, and product impact (field signal that shifts roadmaps/architectures). This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Success requires deep technical project management expertise, extreme ownership of outcomes, and an ability to immerse in customer workflows and partner with customer teams to solve complex engineering problems at pace. This role is based in San Francisco. W