Ops Lead, Life Sciences

About the team
The Business, Life Sciences team at OpenAI tackles domains where frontier AI can transform science and industry, requiring new approaches that cut across GTM, Research, and Product. Our charter is to prove out high-leverage applications, build the right partnerships, and turn early experiments into durable operating models. 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 an Ops Lead to lead initiatives at the intersection of Life Sciences and frontier AI deployment. You will own outcomes across complex cross-functional work, including periods of ambiguity and rapid change. You will lead 1 priority initiative end-to-end at a time and measure outcomes, while keeping the broader portfolio on track through clear priorities, decision discipline, and tight execution.

You will also partner closely with Product, Research, and Applied Evals to translate field learnings into product and model feedback. Success means faster decisions, fewer late surprises, and measurable progress on the work that matters most.

This role is based in San Francisco or New York. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. Travel up to 20% is required.

In this role, you will:

• Own the operating rhythm across a portfolio of concurrent Life Sciences initiatives and keep Research, Product, FDE, GRC, and GTM aligned on priorities and pace.

• Lead 1 priority initiative at a time end-to-end, setting the plan, driving cross-functional execution, and measuring outcomes, then shifting focus as the team’s highest leverage priorities change.

• Maintain a single source of truth for owners, milestones, decisions, risks, dependencies, and escalations across workstreams.

• Run portfolio planning and exec-facing reporting, including lightweight success metrics per initiative and clear visibility into priorities, capacity, risks, and decisions needed.

• Drive decision velocity by structuring options, clarifying tradeoffs, assigning owners, and closing decisions fast enough to keep execution moving.

• Partner tightly with FDE, Research, and Applied Evals to translate field learnings into evals and roadmap inputs that produce concrete product and model feedback.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Bring 6+ years in BizOps, Program Management, Product, Strategy and Ops, or equivalent roles running complex cross-functional programs.

• Build structure in ambiguity, turning fuzzy problems into clear owners, milestones, decision points, and measurable outcomes.

• Think in systems, identifying root causes and installing guardrails that prevent the same errors from recurring.

• Influence senior stakeholders through clear writing, sound logic, and reliable follow-through, especially when incentives conflict.

• Operate with high execution hygiene, driving clear meetings, well-scoped projects, and focusing on outcomes.

• Translate technical complexity into operator clarity, simplifying without losing what matters and keeping technical owners accountable.

• Bring working fluency in life sciences and regulated enterprise deployment, including governance, risk, and validation norms.

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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