Deployment Lead (DL), FDE – Tokyo

About the role

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team turns research breakthroughs into production‑grade systems. As a Deployment Lead (DL) in Tokyo you will own the end‑to‑end delivery of complex AI solutions, translating business outcomes into technical plans and driving execution with FDEs, researchers and customer engineers. You will embed with customers, manage timelines, and ensure successful adoption of the deployed systems.

Key responsibilities

• Define and own technical delivery plans for multiple inter‑dependent workstreams, translating business objectives into roadmaps with milestones and acceptance criteria.
• Run day‑to‑day engineering execution, track progress, unblock dependencies and make real‑time trade‑offs to protect the critical path.
• Embed with customer teams to map workflows, shape tools and integrations, and lead onboarding, adoption and change‑management activities.
• Partner with Product and Research to align platform components and research workstreams with deployment goals.
• Codify reusable solution patterns, extract field signals and feed them back to product and model roadmaps.
• Own value cases and ROI, set impact hypotheses, run pre‑ and post‑deployment measurements and report to executive sponsors.

Required profile

• 7+ years of customer‑facing technical delivery leadership, with a track record of large, high‑stakes AI engagements.
• Proven ability to operate in high‑ambiguity environments, simplify complex problems and drive them to production.
• Strong strategic thinking and pattern‑matching skills to translate customer needs into scalable, reusable solutions.
• Experience shipping AI/LLM systems and understanding of integration and production pitfalls.
• Executive presence and ability to communicate technical trade‑offs to business leaders.

What we offer

• Hybrid work model – three days per week in the Tokyo office.
• Relocation assistance for candidates moving to Tokyo.