AI Deployment Engineer - Startups

About the team The AI Deployment Engineering team works closely with frontier startups. We are trusted advisors to, and thought partners with, startups to ensure that OpenAI’s technology is deployed safely and effectively, whilst also partnering with engineering, research, and product to turn those insights into evaluation systems, product improvements, and better model behavior. This team sits at the intersection of customer reality and model quality. We combine hands-on technical depth with strong product judgment, helping translate complex, high-value use cases into clear signals that can improve both the customer experience and the underlying systems. About the role We are seeking a technically proficient, product-minded engineer to help push the frontier of advanced AI with our strategic startup customers. You'll work with some of the most exciting AI startups in the world, helping them optimize their own systems and turning those learnings into durable improvements across OpenAI’s research and products. You will partner deeply on complex workflows, identify the gaps that matter, and help transform those gaps into reproducible evaluations, technical insights - helping shape OpenAI's research and product direction. This role is well suited to engineers who are equally comfortable debugging a workflow, iterating on prompts or agents, designing evaluations, and collaborating across research and product. You should be excited by ambiguous, high-impact problems and motivated by the opportunity to shape how advanced AI systems improve in practice. This role is based in London. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. In this role, you will: - Work directly with strategic startup customers to understand critical workflows, uncover failure modes, and identify high-impact opportunities for improvement. - Prototype and iterate on prompts, agents, and workflow designs to better understand system behavior and unlock customer value. - Synthesize and deliver valuable feedback to the Product and Research teams, turning real usage patterns into clear, reproducible evals, benchmarks, and technical artifacts that improve model and product quality and ensure customer-grounded learnings influence roadmap and model development. - Build repeatable tools, patterns, and evaluation approaches that raise the quality bar across multiple use cases. - Operate with strong judgment in ambiguous environments, balancing immediate technical problem-solving with longer-term system improvement. - Build relationships within the startup ecosystem, serving as a technical partner to both individual customers and the broader community. You’ll thrive in this role if you: - Have strong software engineering & AI fundamentals. For example, experience as a startup CTO, software engineer, ML engineer, Data Scientist or equivalent. Experience shipping production systems end-to-end is a strong plus. - Have experience as a technical founder, or engineer at an early stage startup - Have familiarity with, or interest in, model training pipelines and reinforcement learning. - Have experience building AI applications, agents, or evaluation systems, and can reason clearly about model behavior in complex workflows. - Are comfortable working directly with highly technical users and translating their challenges into concrete technical signals. - Can move fluidly between prototyping, debugging, evaluation design, and cross-functional collaboration. - Communicate clearly across technical and non-technical audiences. - Bring high agency, strong product sense, and a bias toward building durable improvements rather than one-off fixes 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. 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 uni