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 (e.g., target identification, molecular design, pre-clinical) and development (e.g., trial design, trial ops, biostats) 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.

What you'll do:

• 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.

Full details and application on the official OpenAI careers page.