AI Deployment Engineer

The AI Deployment Engineer helps OpenAI Foundation grantees identify, implement, and scale practical AI uses that expand nonprofit impact. Working directly with nonprofit leaders and technical teams, the engineer helps move ideas through prototyping to production and selects or builds tools suited to each organization’s needs. As an early technical hire, the engineer also supports emerging technical needs across the Foundation.

Responsibilities

• Advise grantees on AI use cases, tool selection, implementation architecture, workflow redesign, evaluation, safety, data handling, and change management.
• Build demonstrations, reference implementations, integrations, and lightweight production systems alongside grantees. Develop reusable tools and implementation guidance for nonprofits and philanthropies.
• Test technical assumptions during grant design and due diligence, prototype internal workflows, and help ensure proposed projects have credible implementation paths.
• Translate lessons from deployments into feedback for the Foundation’s product, tooling, and grantmaking strategy. Build trusted relationships across the nonprofit and philanthropy ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, ideally in forward-deployed, solutions, or customer-facing engineering; founder or founding-engineer experience is highly valued.
• Strong coding ability in languages such as Python, Java, C++, TypeScript, or JavaScript. Strong understanding of AI and LLM tools and real-world practices, including experience building tooling, data infrastructure, evaluations, or agent harnesses that make messy data usable and trustworthy.
• Ability to communicate with technical and nontechnical audiences, turn organizational goals into technical plans, learn unfamiliar domains quickly, and independently manage multiple projects. Product judgment, user empathy, end-to-end ownership, and pragmatism in resource-constrained organizations are important.
• Experience with nonprofits, public-interest technology, grantmaking, education, healthcare, economic opportunity, scientific research, or civic institutions is desirable, not required.

Location and compensation: Based in San Francisco, with three days per week in the office under a hybrid model. Annual base salary is $350,000–$450,000 USD; actual pay depends on job-related factors. The range excludes benefits and other potential compensation.