Partnerships Lead, Healthcare

OpenAI•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

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. 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.

Requirements

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.
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.
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.
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.

Nice To Haves

Willing to travel as needed for strategic partner engagement.

Responsibilities

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.