Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) (Life Sciences)

Location: San Francisco, United States; hybrid work model with 3 days in the office per week; relocation assistance available; travel up to 50% required

Salary: $185K–$300K plus equity

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company building general-purpose AI systems with a focus on safe, beneficial deployment.

What you will do

• Design and ship production systems around AI models for research, clinical, and operational workflows, owning integrations, data provenance, reliability, and on-call readiness.
• Lead discovery and scoping from pre-sales through post-sales, translating ambiguous customer workflows into requirements, execution plans, and measurable endpoints.
• Define launch criteria for regulated environments, including validation evidence, audit readiness, outcome metrics, and sustained production impact.
• Build systems for sensitive scientific data with auditability, validation, access controls, operating procedures, and failure handling.
• Run evaluation loops against workflow-specific scientific benchmarks and use results to drive model and product improvements.
• Turn deployment learnings into reusable primitives, reference architectures, validation templates, and benchmark harnesses for 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.
• End-to-end ownership of customer GenAI deployments from scoping through production adoption, including evaluation design, error analysis, and iterative evidence generation.
• Experience delivering AI systems in trial design, regulatory writing, or scientific operations where validation, auditability, compliance constraints, and reviewer expectations shaped system design and rollout.
• Clear communication across scientific, clinical, model research, technical, and executive audiences, translating technical tradeoffs into decision quality, risk posture, and measurable outcomes.
• Systems thinking and high execution standards, including turning failures, escalations, and audit findings into improved operating standards, validation artifacts, and repeatable deployment playbooks.

Nice to have

• PhD, MS, or equivalent applied experience in a life sciences-relevant field.

Culture & Benefits

• Work with global pharmaceutical and biotech companies, CROs, and research institutions across the R&D value chain.
• Collaborate with Product, Research, Partnerships, GRC, Security, and GTM functions in regulated contexts.
• Hybrid work with three office days per week in San Francisco and relocation assistance.
• Travel of up to 50% is required.
• Equity is included in the compensation package.