Software Engineer, Life Sciences

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.

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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