Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Life Sciences - SF

OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with global pharma and biotech, CROs, and research institutions to deploy existing expertise across the R&D value chain to help customers design and ship production-grade AI systems.

We are hiring a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to push the frontier on what is possible today across drug discovery and development by leading end-to-end deployments of our models inside life sciences organizations and research institutions.

You will work with customers who are deep experts in their scientific or operational domains, translating real-world data, infrastructure, and constraints into production systems.

You will measure success through production adoption, measurable workflow impact, and eval-driven feedback loops, including evaluation benchmarks and acceptance criteria, that inform product and model roadmaps.

Responsibilities

• Design and ship production systems around models, owning integrations, data provenance, reliability, and on-call readiness across research, clinical, and operational workflows.
• Lead discovery and scoping from pre-sales through post-sales, translating ambiguous workflow needs into hypothesis-driven problem framing, system requirements, and an execution plan with measurable endpoints.
• Define and enforce launch criteria for regulated contexts, including validation evidence, audit readiness, outcome metrics, and drive delivery until we demonstrate sustained production impact.
• Build in sensitive scientific data environments where auditability, validation, and access controls shape architecture, operating procedures, and failure handling.
• Run evaluation loops that measure model and system quality against workflow-specific scientific benchmarks and use results to drive model and product changes.
• Distill deployment learnings into hardened primitives, reference architectures, validation templates, and benchmark harnesses that scale across regulated life sciences environments.

Requirements

• Bring 5+ years of software/ML engineering or technical deployment experience with customer-facing ownership in biotech, pharma, clinical research, or scientific software; PhD, MS, or equivalent applied experience in a life sciences relevant field encouraged.
• Have owned customer GenAI deployments end-to-end from scoping through production adoption, and improved them through evaluation design, error analysis, and iterative evidence generation that tightens acceptance criteria over time.
• Have delivered AI systems in trial design, regulatory writing, 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 decision quality, risk posture, and measurable outcomes with credibility.
• Apply systems thinking with high execution standards, consistently turning failures, escalations, and audit findings into improved operating standards, validation artifacts, and repeatable deployment playbooks.

Benefits

• Salary: $185K - $300K
• Hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week
• Relocation assistance
• Travel up to 50% is required