Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Life Sciences

Details

About the team

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. The team operates at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development and works closely with Product, Research, Partnerships, GRC, Security, and GTM teams.

About the role

You will lead end-to-end deployments of OpenAI models inside life sciences organizations and research institutions, from early R&D through clinical and operational workflows. Responsibilities include discovery, technical scoping, system design, build, and production rollout while partnering directly with customer engineering and domain teams. Success is measured through production adoption, measurable workflow impact, and eval-driven feedback that informs product and model roadmaps.

This role is based in San Francisco and uses a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. Relocation assistance is offered. Travel up to 50% is required.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship production systems around models, owning integrations, data flows, reliability, and on-call readiness.
• Lead discovery and scoping from pre-sales through post-sales, including problem framing, constraints, trade-offs, and a delivery plan.
• Define launch criteria for regulated contexts, set outcome metrics, and drive adoption until you prove production impact.
• Build in sensitive data environments where auditability, validation, and access controls drive architecture decisions.
• Run evaluation loops that measure model and system quality in life science workflows to drive model and product improvements.
• Distill production learnings into hardened primitives, reference architectures, and templated workflows that scale across regulated life sciences environments.

Requirements

• 5+ years of software/ML engineering or technical deployment experience with customer-facing ownership in biotech, pharma, clinical research, or scientific software.
• Experience owning GenAI deployments end-to-end from scoping through production adoption and improving them through evals, error analysis, and iteration.
• Experience delivering AI systems in trial design, regulatory writing, or scientific environments where validation, auditability, and compliance constraints shaped the system.
• Strong communication skills across scientific, model research, technical, and executive audiences; ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
• Systems thinking with high execution standards; able to convert failures or escalations in regulated environments into new operating standards.
• Advanced degree or equivalent applied experience preferred in Biomedical Engineering, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, or a related field.

Location & Work Model

• Based in San Francisco, United States.
• Hybrid: 3 days in office per week.
• Travel up to 50% required.
• Relocation assistance offered (for eligible employees).

Benefits

• Base pay range: $220,000 – $280,000 (offers equity). Base pay may vary depending on location, knowledge, skills, and experience.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts (Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, commuter expenses).
• 401(k) with employer match.
• Paid parental leave and paid medical/caregiver leave.
• Flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional company office closures.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend; daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees and additional fringe benefits.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company focused on ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety, diversity of perspectives, and inclusive hiring practices. Background checks and reasonable accommodations information are provided in the posting.