--- title: 'Business Development Lead, Life Sciences at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-lead-life-sciences-openai-san-francisco-8fkbg9qvdsv6' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-11-05' --- # Business Development Lead, Life Sciences at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $400k–$445k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-10-20 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/f42d2e1e-8c2d-47cf-bd29-4b459c06ae1a ## Job description ## About the Team OpenAI’s Partnerships team develops external relationships that advance our research and products and expand how organizations can benefit from AI. Within life sciences, we work across pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, AI-native discovery platforms, research institutions, and experimental labs. We partner closely with Research, Product, Engineering, Safety, GTM, Legal, and Finance to turn complex scientific, technical, and commercial opportunities into durable partnerships. ## About the Role We are hiring a Life Sciences Partnerships Lead to shape and execute OpenAI’s global life sciences partnership strategy. You will lead high-impact research, product, and platform partnerships across the life sciences ecosystem. You will help determine where OpenAI should invest deeply with strategic partners, where we should enable a broader ecosystem, and how research, product, safety, and commercial considerations should shape our decisions. You will bring the voice of life sciences partners into OpenAI while helping internal teams turn ambiguous opportunities into clear decisions and executable plans. This role requires scientific and commercial fluency, strong judgment, and the ability to move complex partnerships from strategy through execution and measurable impact. In this role, you will: - Lead full-lifecycle strategic partnerships, from partner strategy and executive alignment through scoping, commercial negotiation, execution, and ongoing operating reviews. - Identify and prioritize opportunities across pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, AI-native discovery platforms, research institutions, and experimental labs. - Work closely with Research, Product, and Engineering to translate partner needs, scientific workflows, technical constraints, and market dynamics into product and program recommendations. - Partner with Legal, Finance, Safety, Research, and other cross-functional teams to structure partnerships with the appropriate data, deployment, governance, and commercial models. - Coordinate with Health, GTM, GSI/MSSP enablement, and cloud service provider partnership teams to turn strategic relationships into broader ecosystem adoption and measurable impact. - Build trusted relationships with senior executives, scientific leaders, and technical counterparts across the life sciences ecosystem. - Bring structure to ambiguous opportunities, clear blockers across internal and external teams, and communicate decisions and tradeoffs clearly to senior leaders. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have 12+ years of experience in strategic partnerships, product partnerships, business development, or general management across the life sciences and technology industries. - Bring a deep understanding of the life sciences ecosystem, including its scientific workflows, business models, incentives, and key industry dynamics. - Have led complex strategic partnerships spanning research or scientific collaboration, technical execution, commercial terms, go-to-market strategy, and long-term platform alignment. - Can engage credibly with scientific, technical, product, and business leaders and translate between their priorities. - Are an effective cross-functional leader who can drive progress through influence rather than formal authority. - Communicate clearly, think structurally, and make sound prioritization decisions in fast-moving and ambiguous environments. - Exercise exceptional judgment and integrity. ## 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 perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are 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. For additional information, please see [OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology. ## About OpenAI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. - **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO. - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: 2015 - **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment - **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models) - **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity. ## Products & Services - **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows. - **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.). - **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions. - **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system. - **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026). ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials. - **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. - **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models. ## Competitive Advantages - **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI. - **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent. - **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference. - **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products. ## Strategic Focus - **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance). - **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses. - **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026). - **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus. - **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget. - **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI. - **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications. ## Sources 1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/) 2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/) 3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search) 4. 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