Business Lead, Life Sciences

About the team

The Business, Life Sciences team at OpenAI focuses on a small number of the world's most important biopharma and life sciences institutions, where frontier AI can reshape core R&D workflows and where building partnerships can influence the direction of the industry. Our charter is to identify the highest-leverage problems, build flagship partnerships, and turn early 0-1 products into durable operating systems. In life sciences, we work with Research to extend scaling laws into biology and chemistry, aligning scientific progress with real-world deployment.

About the role

We are hiring a Business Lead to own a portfolio of strategic life sciences accounts and turn the highest-potential opportunities into revenue-bearing partnerships. You will shape account/market strategy, buyer narratives, and translate scientific and workflow insight into commercial paths we can credibly close.

You will lead cross-functional deals and deployments across Business, Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE), Research, Product, Legal, Security/GRC, and GTM to land a small number of transformative partnerships in regulated environments. We measure success through closed-won revenue, the quality and ambition of the partnerships you shape, customer outcomes in live deployments, and net expansion.

This role is based in London. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. Travel up to 30% is required.

In this role, you will:

• Own the strategy for a small number of top-priority life sciences accounts, including rigorous qualification, executive mapping, multi-threading, and a clear path from entry point to a broader strategic partnership.

• Build credibility with customers by having a strong point of view, using your fluency in discovery, clinical, submissions, and commercial workflows to shape the roadmap and partnership ambition.

• Drive revenue by leading complex, multi-stakeholder deal cycles from positioning through close, including commercial structuring, pricing, and contracting in close partnership with Research, FDE, Legal, Security/GRC, and Finance.

• Co-design long-range partnerships with customers and internal teams, turning an initial proof point into a broader vision for how AI will change the customer's R&D+ organizations over time.

• Identify and rigorously qualify opportunities where customer value, scientific importance, and OpenAI strategic leverage all align, and manage trade-offs across near-term revenue, near-term delivery, and longer-term platform bets.

• Set and defend launch expectations in regulated contexts, ensuring inspection readiness, evidence standards, and reviewer trust under delivery pressure.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Bring 8+ years of experience leading strategic partnerships or business development for technical products in regulated life sciences (biotech, pharma, clinical research), with a track record closing and expanding a small number of large, multi-year, high-complexity deals.

• Have led commercialization of technical products where adoption, governance, and executive trust determined expansion, and can translate deployment evidence into a clear business case and long-range partnership vision for R&D leadership.

• Build trust with clinical, regulatory, privacy, and safety stakeholders by aligning contract terms, controls, and delivery plans to risk posture and inspection readiness.

• Communicate clearly across scientific, technical, and executive audiences, and move from deep workflow discussion to clear positioning, negotiation, and decision-making while maintaining credibility.

• Build alignment across researchers, builders, and customer-facing teams, internally and with partners across industry, startups, and academia.

• Apply systems thinking with high execution standards, turning failures or escalations in regulated environments into improved operating standards and stronger partner governance.

• Hold a strong thesis on AI x Science and place credible market bets on which biology and chemistry problems to solve, which customers to pursue, and which 0-1 builds can become repeatable programs.

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.

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