Frontier AI Research · San Francisco
About the team
OpenAI’s Health & Life Sciences team works at the frontier of AI and scientific discovery. We partner with leading healthcare organizations, life sciences companies, research institutions, and data ecosystems to apply advanced AI to some of the world’s most important problems—from improving patient care and accelerating drug discovery to advancing biological research. Our work sits at the intersection of Research, Product, Go-to-Market, and Strategic Partnerships, helping translate frontier models into real-world impact.
About the role
OpenAI is hiring a Partnerships Lead to drive strategic initiatives across health, biology, medicine, and life sciences. This person will identify, evaluate, structure, and scale high-impact partnerships that strengthen OpenAI’s models, products, and long-term position in these sectors.
The scope spans data and research collaborations, ecosystem partnerships, product integrations, and strategic commercial relationships with health systems, pharma and biotech companies, research labs, academic institutions, and emerging technology platforms.
A core mandate of the role is helping OpenAI determine where partnerships can create differentiated advantage—through unique datasets, benchmarks, workflows, expert feedback loops, research collaborations, and scaled product deployment opportunities. This is a highly cross-functional role requiring strong judgment, high ownership, and comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments.
In this role, you will:
Identify and evaluate strategic partnership opportunities across healthcare, biotech, pharma, life sciences, and research ecosystems.
Assess datasets, benchmarks, workflows, and collaborations for their potential to improve OpenAI’s models, evaluations, products, or strategic position.
Structure and negotiate partnerships spanning data access, research collaborations, commercial deployments, product integrations, and ecosystem alliances.
Translate ambiguous external opportunities into clear internal recommendations, priorities, milestones, and execution plans.
Partner closely with Research, Applied, Product, Legal, Policy, Safety, and GTM teams to diligence and launch partnerships.
Build senior relationships with health systems, life sciences companies, academic institutions, labs, startups, and ecosystem leaders.
Develop executive-facing memos, market maps, diligence materials, and strategic recommendations.
Track outcomes from partnerships and help determine where OpenAI should double down, iterate, or stop.
Represent OpenAI externally in high-stakes meetings, conferences, and strategic industry forums.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 7+ years of experience in partnerships, business development, strategy, product, investing, or operating roles within healthcare, life sciences, biotech, medtech, or other complex technical industries.
Have strong commercial and strategic judgment, with the ability to distinguish interesting ideas from truly high-leverage opportunities.
Can reason across technical, scientific, operational, legal, and business dimensions simultaneously.
Are comfortable engaging with senior executives, researchers, product leaders, and external stakeholders alike.
Communicate clearly and persuasively in both written and verbal settings, especially with executive audiences.
Operate with high ownership and move complex workstreams forward without heavy structure.
Learn quickly and can ramp into unfamiliar technical or scientific domains with humility and speed.
Are energized by ambiguity and excited to build in a rapidly evolving space.
Care deeply about how AI can improve health outcomes, accelerate science, and expand human capability.
Are willing to travel as needed for strategic partner engagement.
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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