Technical Deployment Lead, Life Sciences

About the team OpenAI’s Forward Deployed Engineering team partners with customers to turn research breakthroughs into production systems. We operate at the intersection of customer delivery and core platform development. About the Role As a Technical Deployment Lead (TDL) for Life Sciences, you will define how OpenAI delivers complex systems to customers. You will own how they are built, shipped, and adopted. You’ll translate business outcomes into a technical plan, run day-to-day execution across FDEs, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, and partner with customer teams to ensure delivery supports their goals. You will focus on the Life Sciences vertical, partnering with pharmaceutical companies, clinical research organizations, and other data and services providers to deploy next-generation AI capabilities across their drug discovery, development, and operations. You will own delivery end-to-end: embedding with Life Sciences customers to map workflows and success criteria, ensuring components ship on time, and leading readiness and change management for adoption. You’ll track progress, manage dependencies, make sequencing decisions, and drive 0→1 prototypes through MVP and scale. You will also share field insights with Product and Research to guide roadmap and priorities. Success will be measured first and foremost by impact - deployments that deliver measurable value against customer goals, drive adoption, and become critical to their workflows. Additional measures of success include delivery reliability (milestones hit, low reopen/churn), operating leverage (patterns reused across deployments), judgment under pressure, and product impact (field signal that shifts roadmaps/architectures). This is a high-trust, high-autonomy role. Success requires deep technical project management expertise, extreme ownership of outcomes, and an ability to immerse in customer workflows and partner with customer teams to solve complex engineering problems at pace. 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 50% is required. In this role, you will: - Own the technical delivery plan for multiple interdependent workstreams. Translate business objectives into a roadmap with milestones, dependencies, and acceptance criteria.

• Run day-to-day engineering execution. Track and drive delivery across OpenAI FDE and customer teams. Keep progress unblocked and sequenced. Make real-time trade-offs on scope and priority to protect the critical path.
• Embed with customer teams to land production deployments and drive adoption. Map workflows, shape tools/integrations, and translate requirements into a delivery plan. Lead onboarding, adoption, and change management.
• Partner with Product and Research so platform components and research workstreams land in time to support deployment goals.
• Codify solution patterns and evals. Extract reusable patterns and package field signals to improve product and models.
• Own value cases and ROI. Set impact hypotheses, baselines, and KPIs; run pre-/post-deployment measurement and report to exec sponsors.
• Shape how we engage Life Sciences customers You’ll thrive in this role if you: - Bring 7+ years of customer‑facing technical delivery leadership.
• Have expertise in Life Sciences - Track record of successfully leading large, complex, high-stakes customer engagements where customer outcomes depended on tight coordination and fast decision making, ideally involving AI.
• Excel in high ambiguity environments. Know how to simplify complex and dynamic work.
• Move fluidly between system level understanding and execution level detail; can dive into customer workflows/data, map constraints, sketch architectures and move ambiguous problems to shipped systems.
• Think strategically and pattern-match. Able to step back from execution detail, recognise broader trends across deployments, and connect customer needs to scalable, reusable solutions.
• Have strong technical fluency and sharp sequencing instincts. Confident discussing technical details, pressure-testing architectures, and making trade-offs.
• Have shipped AI/LLM systems. You understand solution patterns, integration basics, and production pitfalls.
• You’re a translator with executive presence. You make complex technical trade-offs legible to business leaders and convert strategy into day-to-day technical execution.
• Enjoy being onsite with customers to accelerate delivery (often 25-50%, sometimes higher). 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 pers

• To stand out as a Technical Deployment Lead for Life Sciences at OpenAI, create a portfolio showcasing your experience with complex system deployments, highlighting successes and challenges in the life sciences industry, and demonstrate how you've applied technical expertise to drive business outcomes.
• Develop a deep understanding of OpenAI's Forward Deployed Engineering team and its partnerships with life sciences customers, and prepare to discuss how your skills and experience align with the company's goals and values.
• Since Excel is a required skill, prepare examples of how you've used Excel to analyze data, track project progress, or create reports in a technical deployment context, and be ready to walk the interviewer through your workflow and problem-solving process.
• As OpenAI is a leader in AI research and development, familiarize yourself with the company's research breakthroughs and be prepared to discuss how you would translate these into production systems for life sciences customers, demonstrating your ability to think critically about the intersection of technology and industry.
• Prepare to discuss your experience working with cross-functional teams, including FDEs, Researchers, and Customer Engineers, and highlight your ability to communicate technical plans and execution to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, showcasing your collaboration and leadership skills.
• Research OpenAI's compensation package and benefits, and be prepared to negotiate salary based on industry standards and your experience, taking into account the company's location in San Francisco and the cost of living in the area.