AI Deployment Engineer

AI is already changing how people work, learn, and access care. It has the potential to unlock extraordinary benefits—faster medical breakthroughs, accelerated scientific discovery, more personalized services in healthcare and education, new tools for creativity and invention, higher productivity and economic growth, improved public services like transportation systems, and so much more.

But building powerful systems to benefit humanity is only a part of the work of our mission. Advanced AI models will also present new challenges that are already surfacing, and we need to be prepared to identify these challenges and develop solutions to address them.

These are the two dimensions of what we’re building the Foundation to do. We aim to enable the use of AI to find solutions to humanity’s hardest problems, transform what people are capable of, and deliver real benefits in people’s lives—while working hard with partners to be ready for new challenges, and to help make society resilient, as AI advances.

This work is just beginning. Over the next year, as we quickly ramp up, the Foundation expects to invest at least $1 billion across life sciences and curing diseases, jobs and economic impact, AI resilience, and community programs. This includes early investments toward our previously announced $25 billion commitment to curing diseases and AI resilience.

Frontier AI can, and must, benefit all of humanity. This requires genuine engagement and co‑desig n with the communities and institutions doing the world's most important work on the ground. The OpenAI Foundation will fund high‑impact nonprofits to expand their impact with AI, but funding alone will not be sufficient. Technical talent can help turn Foundation grants into successful real‑world deployments.

We are seeking an AI Deployment Engineer to advise Foundation grantees on how to identify, implement, and scale AI use cases that transform their work and impact. You'll work directly with nonprofit leaders and technical teams, helping them move from idea to prototype to production while choosing (or building) the AI tools that best fit their needs.

As an early technical hire for the Foundation, you will also flex to support emerging needs across the organization. This may include pressure‑testing technical assumptions before grant approval, prototyping internal workflows, building tools for the world's first AI‑native philanthropy, and translating lessons from grantee deployments into repeatable implementation guidance for the broader nonprofit sector.

This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week.

• Partner closely with high-impact nonprofit grantees as a technical thought partner, helping them identify practical AI use cases and move from ideation to successful deployment.
• Advise nonprofits on tool selection, implementation architecture, workflow redesign, evaluation, safety, data handling, and change management.
• Prototype alongside grantees, building demonstrations, reference implementations, integrations, and lightweight production systems that make AI adoption concrete.
• Pressure-test technical assumptions during grant design and due diligence so Foundation funding is matched with credible implementation paths.
• Develop reusable tools that 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 strong relationships across the nonprofit and philanthropy ecosystem, serving as a trusted technical advisor to organizations working on urgent human needs.

• Have 5+ years of experience as a software engineer, ideally in a forward‑deployed, solutions, or customer‑facing engineering setting; experience as a founder or founding engineer is highly valued.
• Have a strong grasp of AI/LLM tools and best practices in real world applications, having built tooling, data infrastructure, evals, or agent harnesses that turn messy real‑world data into something usable and trustworthy
• Can communicate clearly with both technical…