Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Healthcare - SF
OpenAIRole Description & Requirements
About the Team
OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with healthcare organizations to deploy production AI systems across clinical, operational, and member-facing workflows. We work at the boundary of customer deployment and core platform development, using customer engagements to define repeatable architectures, evaluations, integrations, and operating standards for complex, regulated healthcare environments.
About the Role
We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to own end-to-end deployments of our models within healthcare organizations, including payers, providers, health systems, and healthcare technology companies. You will lead technical discovery, architecture, implementation, evaluation, productionization, and handoff, translating complex customer workflows, data, infrastructure, and regulatory constraints into production AI systems.
You will measure success through production adoption, measurable workflow impact, and evaluation loops that establish customer-specific benchmarks, acceptance criteria, and launch readiness. You’ll collaborate directly with customer technical and operational teams, alongside internal Business, Research, Product, Engineering, and Security partners, to deliver solutions and translate deployment learnings into product improvements. This role owns the technical solution; ownership of the commercial or executive relationship is not required.
This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. Travel up to 50% is required.
In this role, you will:
Own the technical solution end to end, from customer discovery and workflow scoping through architecture, hands-on implementation, evaluation, production deployment, adoption, and handoff.
Partner credibly with customer engineers, operators, and domain experts to frame ambiguous problems, define scope, and translate payer, provider, or health-system workflows into technical requirements and measurable outcomes.
Design and implement production AI applications and agentic systems that integrate with customer infrastructure, enterprise APIs, data platforms, electronic health records, claims systems, and operational tools.
Build with appropriate safeguards for protected health information (PHI), HIPAA, privacy, security, authorization, governance, auditability, and other regulated-delivery requirements.
Define and operationalize evaluations, validation evidence, human-review workflows, escalation paths, and launch criteria that measure model and system quality against customer-specific acceptance thresholds.
Use evaluation results, error analysis, observability, and customer feedback to improve system reliability, performance, model selection, workflow impact, and production readiness.
Distill deployment learnings into reference architectures, interoperability and integration patterns, evaluation harnesses, security controls, and reusable technical primitives for healthcare and other regulated enterprise environments.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Bring 6+ years of software engineering, ML/AI engineering, solutions engineering, technical consulting, or comparable experience, with the technical depth
Have operated as a senior engineer, tech lead, or deployment owner who is trusted to make technical decisions in ambiguous environments.
Are deeply hands-on and have personally owned technical discovery, architecture, implementation, evaluation, productionization, and handoff for complex customer-facing or enterprise systems.
Have healthcare experience including payer workflows, provider operations, EHR systems, or interoperability standards such as Epic, HL7, and FHIR.
Have exposure to provider or health-system workflows such as clinical operations, revenue cycle management, patient access, or contact centers; or to EHR and interoperability technologies such as Epic, Oracle Health/Cerner, MEDITECH, HL7, FHIR, or health information exchanges.
Have shipped complex systems as a forward deployed or customer engineer, an engineer inside a payer, provider, or health system, a builder at an EHR, interoperability, revenue cycle, payer-tech, or healthcare infrastructure company, a hands-on technical consultant or integrator, a solutions architect for regulated enterprises, or a technical founder or early engineering leader.
Apply strong judgment to AI evaluation, privacy, security, governance, and reliability. Prior FDE titles, clinical credentials, and experience across every healthcare domain are not required.
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 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.
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