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