Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Life Sciences - NYC

Location: New York City, United States. Hybrid work with 3 days in the office per week; travel up to 50% is required. Relocation assistance is offered.

Salary: $185K–$300K plus equity.

Company

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

What you will do

• Design and ship production systems around models across 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 workflow needs into system requirements and measurable execution plans.
• Define launch criteria for regulated environments, including validation evidence, audit readiness, outcome metrics, and sustained production impact.
• Build systems in sensitive scientific data environments where auditability, validation, access controls, operating procedures, and failure handling shape the architecture.
• Run evaluation loops against workflow-specific scientific benchmarks and use the results to drive model and product changes.
• Turn deployment learnings into hardened 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.
• Experience improving deployments through evaluation design, error analysis, and iterative evidence generation that tightens acceptance criteria.
• Experience delivering AI systems in trial design, regulatory writing, or scientific operations where validation strategy, auditability, compliance constraints, and reviewer expectations shaped system design and rollout.
• Ability to communicate 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

• Hybrid work model with 3 office days per week in New York City.
• Relocation assistance is available.
• Travel of up to 50% is required.
• Equity is included in the compensation package.
• Equal opportunity employer committed to reasonable accommodations and legally compliant background checks.