AI Deployment Engineer

About the role

Frontier AI can, and must, benefit all of humanity. This requires genuine engagement and co-design 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.

In this role, you will

• 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.

You'll thrive in this role if you

• 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.
• Strong coder with demonstrated proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Java, C++, TypeScript/JavaScript
• 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 and nontechnical audiences and translate organizational goals into concrete technical plans.
• Are energized by an unfamiliar technical domain and have a track record of going deep fast.
• Bring strong product instincts, user empathy, and a pragmatic sense of what will actually work inside resource-constrained organizations.
• Own problems end-to-end and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you’re missing to get the job done.
• Are an effective, high throughput operator who can drive multiple concurrent projects, prioritize ruthlessly, and operate independently with little oversight. 
• Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help colleagues and partners, and a desire to make the broader mission succeed.

Experience with nonprofits, public-interest technology, grantmaking, education, healthcare, economic opportunity, scientific research, or civic institutions is desirable but not required.