AI Deployment Engineer

OpenAI Foundation • San Francisco, CA

2d • Hybrid

About The Position

The OpenAI Foundation is seeking an AI Deployment Engineer to help high-impact nonprofit grantees identify, implement, and scale AI use cases. The engineer will work directly with nonprofit leaders and technical teams, guiding projects from initial idea through prototype and production and helping select or build tools suited to each organization’s needs.

As an early technical hire, the role will also support emerging needs across the Foundation. This may include evaluating technical assumptions before grant approval, prototyping internal workflows, building tools for an AI-native philanthropy, and turning lessons from grantee deployments into reusable implementation guidance for the nonprofit sector. The role is based in San Francisco and follows a hybrid work model with three days in the office per week.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of experience as a software engineer; forward-deployed, solutions, or customer-facing engineering experience is ideal.
• Strong coding skills and demonstrated proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Java, C++, TypeScript, or JavaScript.
• Strong understanding of AI/LLM tools and best practices in real-world applications, with experience building tooling, data infrastructure, evaluations, or agent harnesses that make messy real-world data usable and trustworthy.
• Ability to communicate clearly with technical and nontechnical audiences and translate organizational goals into concrete technical plans.
• Ability to learn unfamiliar technical domains quickly.
• Strong product instincts, user empathy, and pragmatic judgment about what will work in resource-constrained organizations.
• Ability to own problems end-to-end and acquire missing knowledge as needed.
• Ability to drive multiple concurrent projects, prioritize effectively, and operate independently with little oversight.
• A humble, helpful attitude and desire to support colleagues, partners, and the broader mission.

Nice To Haves

• Founder or founding engineer experience.
• Experience with nonprofits, public-interest technology, grantmaking, education, healthcare, economic opportunity, scientific research, or civic institutions.

Responsibilities

• Partner with nonprofit grantees as a technical thought partner, identifying practical AI use cases and helping move them from ideation to deployment.
• Advise nonprofits on tool selection, implementation architecture, workflow redesign, evaluation, safety, data handling, and change management.
• Build prototypes with grantees, including demonstrations, reference implementations, integrations, and lightweight production systems.
• Pressure-test technical assumptions during grant design and due diligence to ensure funding is matched with credible implementation paths.
• Develop reusable tools to help nonprofits and philanthropies deploy AI responsibly and effectively.
• Synthesize insights from grantee work into feedback for the Foundation’s product, tooling, and grantmaking strategy.
• Build relationships across the nonprofit and philanthropy ecosystem and serve as a trusted technical advisor.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed