Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Forward Deployed Engineering is an increasingly important interface layer in modern SaaS, where platform capabilities only become durable revenue when customers can implement them reliably. This program manager role is notable because it focuses on the internal systems that make customer-facing technical delivery repeatable, translating deployment learnings into shared practices across Product, Engineering, and GTM.
For a SaaS career, the work builds a strong foundation in operationalizing knowledge at scale. Owning onboarding and enablement for a technical field function develops fluency in how SaaS teams reduce time to productivity, maintain consistency across implementations, and keep playbooks current as products evolve. The emphasis on measurement and feedback loops also aligns with how SaaS organizations iterate on internal programs with the same rigor they apply to product adoption.
This role tends to suit professionals who prefer building infrastructure over running one-off sessions, and who are comfortable coordinating across senior stakeholders without direct authority. It also fits those drawn to ambiguous problem spaces where the goal is to convert tacit field experience into clear, reusable assets that improve execution across a growing technical organization.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the team
OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production-grade AI systems. FDE sits at the intersection of Product, Engineering, Research, and GTM. We embed deeply with users to solve high-leverage problems and surface patterns that shape our platform. We take frontier capabilities into the real world and translate customer signal into durable solutions, repeatable patterns, and product direction.
About the role
We’re hiring an Onboarding & Enablement Program Manager to build, run, and evolve the systems that help the FDE team ramp quickly, stay current, and execute consistently as the organization scales. This role sits at the core of the team and directly shapes how effectively new engineers onboard, how knowledge from deployments becomes reusable, and how enablement keeps pace with fast-moving platform, product, and organizational change.
You will partner closely with FDE leadership and cross-functional stakeholders in Engineering, Product, and GTM to translate field learnings and evolving team needs into structured onboarding and enablement programs. You will build the systems that improve ramp speed, strengthen knowledge sharing, and increase execution consistency as the team scales. This role is a key enabler of an AI-first FDE function that scales its impact through better systems, reusable knowledge, and compounding team effectiveness rather than linear headcount growth.
This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role you will
Own FDE onboarding end-to-end, designing and operating a structured ramp experience that helps new team members become effective quickly in a complex technical environment.
Build and evolve the team’s enablement infrastructure, including onboarding pathways, playbooks, learning assets, and knowledge systems to continuously upskill the FDE team and embed AI-first tools and workflows into day-to-day execution.
Partner with adjacent field, deployment, and partner teams to build enablement programs, resources, and operating mechanisms that improve coordination and execution across closely related functions.
Codify patterns and lessons from FDE deployments into reusable resources that reduce repeated learning and strengthen execution across the organization.
Operate the core cadence behind onboarding and enablement, including program planning, stakeholder coordination, content refresh, and session scheduling.
Measure ramp and enablement effectiveness through adoption signals, feedback loops, and performance outcomes, then use that data to improve the system over time.
You might thrive in this role if you
Bring 5+ years in onboarding program management, enablement, learning and development, operations, or similar roles supporting technical teams in fast-paced, high-ambiguity environments.
Have built or run onboarding and enablement programs that helped new hires ramp quickly and become effective in complex technical roles.
Think in terms of compounding leverage rather than one-off solutions, building systems that help small teams achieve outsized impact through reusable knowledge, better tooling, and AI-native workflows.
Have experience translating emerging AI capabilities into practical workflows that improve how technical teams operate.
Have experience building onboarding or enablement programs that serve more than one closely related team or function, while balancing shared standards with role-specific needs.
Bring structure to ambiguity and turn fast-changing or informal knowledge into clear, repeatable systems that others can rely on.
Are comfortable working across teams and driving alignment with stakeholders across FDE leadership, Engineering, Product, and GTM.
Use data, feedback, and adoption signals to improve programs over time rather than treating rollout as the finish line.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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