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

**Company**: OpenAI
**Location**: New York
**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/a12c3c93-51df-437d-862f-4892367fea32?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/job/forward-deployed-engineer-fde-life-sciences-nyc-f142cf5c-415/

## Description

## Job Overview

We are seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) to join our Forward Deployed Engineering team at OpenAI. The successful candidate will work on deploying existing expertise across the R&D value chain to help customers design and ship production-grade AI systems. This role is based in New York City and offers a salary range of $185K - $300K.

## About the Role

As a Forward Deployed Engineer, you will lead end-to-end deployments of our models inside life sciences organizations and research institutions. Your primary focus will be on pushing the frontier of what is possible today across drug discovery and development. You will work closely with customers who are deep experts in their scientific or operational domains, translating real-world data, infrastructure, and constraints into production systems.

## Key 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

- 5+ years of software/ML engineering or technical deployment experience with customer-facing ownership in biotech, pharma, clinical research, or scientific software.

- Experience with GenAI deployments end-to-end from scoping through production adoption, and improving them through evaluation design, error analysis, and iterative evidence generation.

- Strong communication skills, with the ability to translate technical tradeoffs into decision quality, risk posture, and measurable outcomes with credibility.

- Systems thinking with high execution standards, consistently turning failures, escalations, and audit findings into improved operating standards, validation artifacts, and repeatable deployment playbooks.

## Benefits

OpenAI offers a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week, relocation assistance, and travel up to 50%.

## Company Culture

OpenAI is 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.

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## Skills

### Required
- software engineering
- ML engineering
- technical deployment
- GenAI deployments
- evaluation design
- error analysis
- iterative evidence generation

### Nice to have
- PhD
- MS
- life sciences relevant field

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Source: [Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/a12c3c93-51df-437d-862f-4892367fea32?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)