OpenAI
Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Legal-SF
$185K–$300K
New York City · Hybrid · Full-time · Posted Aug 27, 2026
- Experience
- 5+ years; no stated alternative.
About the job
Build and deploy AI systems for legal work, from customer discovery and prototyping through production adoption, and turn successful solutions into repeatable patterns.
What you'll do
- Work with law firms and legal teams to identify high-value workflows and guide adoption of deployed solutions.
- Build full-stack systems, contribute code, and make delivery trade-offs to achieve customer value.
- Turn deployment learnings into reusable tools and playbooks, and share model feedback with Research and Product.
What they ask for
- 5+ years of software engineering, ML engineering, or technical deployment experience with customer-facing ownership in financial services or adjacent regulated industries.
- End-to-end ownership of complex AI or data-driven systems through production adoption in high-consequence environments.
- Production-grade backend and frontend coding using Python, JavaScript, or comparable stacks.
- Experience deploying LLM- or generative-model-powered systems, including understanding model behavior, evaluation, and guardrails.
Nice to have
- Experience with legal technology, legal services, compliance-heavy workflows, or professional services.
Pay
$185K – $300K USD base salary
Tools
Python, JavaScript
AI focus
Build and deploy AI systems for legal analysis, drafting, research, and work with complex case records; evaluate model behavior and apply guardrails.
Model-written summary · the original posting is authoritative