Technical Deployment Lead - Tokyo

Job description

About the team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development. About the Role This is a founding role. As a Technical Deployment Lead (TDL), you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers. You will own how they are built, shipped, and adopted. You’ll translate business outcomes into a technical plan, run day-to-day execution across FDEs, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, and partner with customer teams to ensure delivery supports their goals. This is not a management role, however you'll own delivery end-to-end: embedding with customers to map workflows and success criteria, ensuring components ship on time, and leading readiness and change management for adoption. You’ll track progress, manage dependencies, make sequencing decisions, and drive 0→1 prototypes through MVP and scale. You will also share field insights with Product and Research to guide roadmap and priorities. Success will be measured first and foremost by impact - deployments that deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to their workflows. Additional measures of success include delivery reliability (milestones hit, low reopen/churn), operating leverage (patterns reused across deployments), judgment under pressure, and product impact (field signal that shifts roadmaps/architectures). This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Success requires deep technical project management expertise, extreme ownership of outcomes, and an ability to immerse in customer workflows and partner with customer teams to solve complex engineering problems at pace. This role is based in Tokyo. We use a hybrid model of 3 days in office and offer relocation assistance. Travel up to 25-50% is required. To succeed in this position you must be fully bilingual—fluent in both Japanese and English (spoken and written). Please note that your resume must be submitted in English, and the interview process will include conversations in both languages. In this role, you will: Own the technical delivery plan for multiple interdependent workstreams. Translate business objectives into a roadmap with milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria. Run day-to-day engineering execution. Track and drive delivery ac…