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.