# Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE), Life Sciences - SF

**Company**: OpenAI
**Location**: San Francisco, California
**Work arrangement**: hybrid
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Salary**: $185K - $300K
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology
**Wikidata**: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q124605186

**Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/218c0b55-53bd-4df6-805d-321a8c2e7db7?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/job/forward-deployed-engineer-fde-life-sciences-sf-544ea727-bfb/

## Description

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

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## Skills

### Required
- software engineering
- ML engineering
- technical deployment
- life sciences

### Nice to have
- GenAI deployments
- evaluation design
- error analysis
- iterative evidence generation

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Source: [Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/218c0b55-53bd-4df6-805d-321a8c2e7db7?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)