Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Life Sciences - SF

About the team

OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with life sciences organizations to deploy production AI systems across scientific and operational workflows. We work at the boundary of customer deployment and core platform development, using early engagements to define repeatable system patterns, evals, and operating standards for life sciences environments.

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, focusing on workflows across discovery, clinical development, submissions, and scientific operations. You will work with customers who are experts in their domains, translating data, infrastructure, and workflow constraints into production systems and helping define how frontier models can be applied in regulated environments.

You will measure success through production adoption, workflow impact, and eval loops that define workflow-specific benchmarks, acceptance criteria, and launch evidence for production use. You’ll work closely with Business, Research, Platform/Product, Engineering, and Security/GRC, using deployment learnings to improve both customer systems and the product and model roadmaps supporting them.

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 30% is required.

In this role you will

• Own deployments from initial scoping through production adoption, including technical decisions, sequencing, and launch readiness.

• Partner with customers and internal teams to frame problems, define scope, and translate ambiguous workflow needs into system requirements and measurable endpoints.

• Define launch criteria for regulated contexts, including validation evidence, outcome metrics, and acceptance thresholds tied to production use.

• Enforce operating standards for auditability, traceability, and inspection readiness in the systems you ship.

• Design evals that measure model and system quality against workflow-specific scientific benchmarks and acceptance criteria.

• Use evaluation results, error analysis, and deployment learning to improve model selection, system design, and product feedback.

• Distill deployment learnings into reference architectures, validation templates, benchmark harnesses, and other technical primitives that can be reused across life sciences environments.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Bring 6+ years of software, ML/AI, or deployment engineering experience with customer-facing ownership in biotech, pharma, clinical research, scientific software, or adjacent technical domains.

• Have operated as a senior engineer, tech lead, or deployment owner who is trusted to make technical decisions in ambiguous environments.

• Have owned customer GenAI deployments end-to-end from scoping through production adoption.

• Have improved deployed systems through eval design, error analysis, and evidence generation that hones acceptance criteria over time.

• Have delivered AI systems in workflows such as discovery, clinical development, regulatory writing, submissions, or scientific operations where validation strategy, auditability, compliance constraints, and reviewer expectations shaped system design and rollout.

• Communicate clearly across scientific, clinical, model research, technical, and executive audiences, translating technical tradeoffs into decisions, operating procedures, and measurable outcomes with credibility and a clear point of view.

• Apply systems thinking and engineering judgment, turning failures, escalations, and audit findings into improved operating standards, validation artifacts, and repeatable deployment patterns.

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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