---
title: 'Software Engineer, Life Sciences at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-life-sciences-openai-san-francisco-zxwa7s09jzsc'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-05'
---

# Software Engineer, Life Sciences at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $347k–$450k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-10-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/4f0d64b8-bfa7-4c30-9972-a10d74b49075

## Job description

## About the team

Life sciences is one of the clearest areas where advances in intelligence can meaningfully benefit the world at large. The OpenAI Life Sciences team works at the intersection of advancing frontier life sciences model capabilities and building products to help scientists accelerate their research and leverage the full potential of AI for scientific work. We’re building platforms that connect model intelligence with practical scientific workflows. Our work covers workflows from next-gen sequencing analysis to designing new drugs, helping scientists run computational workloads as well as access laboratory services. By making these capabilities more accessible and useful, we aim to improve early discovery and support downstream progress in drug development.

## About the role

We’re looking for experienced full-stack product engineers with strong backend skills to join our growing Life Sciences team. This is an individual contributor role with substantial ownership. You’ll help define products, design systems, and ship experiences that connect scientists with AI capabilities and laboratory workflows. You’ll work across the stack, partnering with researchers, scientists, and infrastructure engineers to turn complex needs into reliable, intuitive products. We value strong engineering fundamentals, product judgment, and experience shipping to large user bases. Life sciences experience is helpful, but you don’t need a scientific background to make a meaningful contribution.

In this role, you will

- Design backend services, APIs, and integrations that connect users with models, scientific tools, and laboratory services.
- Create intuitive interfaces that help scientists navigate complex workflows.
- Own projects from problem definition and technical design through launch, operation, and iteration.
- Work with scientific and research partners to identify user needs and prioritize valuable product improvements.
- Partner with dedicated infrastructure engineers on performance, reliability, and scaling.
- Make thoughtful engineering decisions that balance speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.

You might thrive in this role if you

- Have strong software engineering fundamentals and depth in backend development, alongside the ability to build across the stack.
- Have shipped and operated products used by large user bases.
- Bring strong product sense and can translate ambiguous needs into useful software.
- Work autonomously, make sound technical decisions, and drive projects forward with limited direction.
- Enjoy hands-on building and taking ownership within a lean team.
- Are excited about advances in AI and how they could change scientific work.
- Learn unfamiliar domains quickly and collaborate effectively with scientific and technical partners.

Particularly relevant experience

- Building AI applications, model-serving integrations, or inference platforms.
- Developing marketplaces or products that coordinate services and complex workflows.
- Taking new products from early concepts through launch and adoption.
- Working with scientific tools, research data, or laboratory systems.

## 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. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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