Business Development Lead, Life Sciences
About this role
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.
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.
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