Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Life Sciences - SF

About the team

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development.

About the role

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to lead end-to-end deployments of our models inside life sciences organizations and research institutions, from early R&D through clinical and operational workflows. You will own discovery, technical scoping, system design, build, and production rollout, partnering directly with customer engineering and domain teams.

You will measure success through production adoption, measurable workflow impact, and eval-driven feedback that changes product and model roadmaps. You’ll work closely with our Product, Research, Partnerships, GRC, Security, and GTM teams.

This role is based in San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week. We offer relocation assistance. Travel up to 50% is required.

In this role you will

• 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, 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.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Bring 5+ years of software/ML engineering or technical deployment experience with customer-facing ownership in biotech, pharma, clinical research, or scientific software; advanced degree or equivalent applied experience preferred in Biomedical Engineering, Computational Biology, Bioinformatics, or a related field

• Have owned customer GenAI deployments end-to-end from scoping through production adoption and improved them through evals, error analysis, and iteration

• Have delivered AI systems in trial design, regulatory writing, or scientific environments where validation, auditability, and compliance constraints shaped the system

• Communicate clearly across scientific, model research, technical, and executive audiences, translating technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders with credibility

• Apply systems thinking with high execution standards, consistently turning failures or escalations in regulated environments into new operating standards

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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