Deployment Lead, Life Sciences- NYC

About this role

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 Deployment Lead 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.