Sales Manager, Life Sciences

OpenAI•San Francisco, CA

About The Position

As Sales Manager, Life Sciences, you will build and lead a team of Account Directors focused on landing and growing our largest Life Sciences customers — global pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, medical device and diagnostics firms, contract research organizations (CROs), and large research institutions. You’ll be a hands-on front-line leader: coaching reps through complex opportunities, driving disciplined pipeline and forecasting practices, and creating the vertical GTM playbook for how OpenAI engages the Life Sciences market. This foundational leadership role will shape how leading Life Sciences organizations adopt AI and how we scale this motion across Enterprise.

Requirements

15+ years of experience in enterprise sales, success, or GTM leadership, with significant time leading at scale.
Proven track record of driving revenue growth in enterprise segments ($100M+ businesses).
Experience leading verticalized sales motions and building go-to-market plays from scratch.
Strong operational orientation: comfortable with capacity planning, pipeline rigor, forecasting, and data-driven execution.
Low-ego, culture-first leader who builds trust across teams and inspires followership.
Comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change; thrives in a dynamic, startup-like environment inside a global company.
Public company experience is strongly preferred.

Nice To Haves

Have direct Life Sciences experience — selling into pharma, biotech, medtech, diagnostics, CROs, or research institutions with a strong understanding of regulatory, compliance, and data landscapes.
Bring an existing network of senior Life Sciences executives and can convene the right stakeholders around new AI initiatives.
Are a coach-first leader — energized by being in deals with your team, giving direct feedback, and watching reps level up.
Have helped build or refine verticalized GTM motions and are excited to codify operating rhythms, playbooks, and best practices from a relatively early starting point.
Are comfortable with technical depth — you’re not an engineer, but you quickly understand AI, data, and API concepts and can guide your team to do the same.
Are energized by big goals and ambiguity — large revenue targets, fast hiring, evolving products, and a rapidly changing market feel like an opportunity, not a deterrent.

Responsibilities

Recruit, develop, and lead a team of Enterprise Account Directors focused on new business and strategic expansion in Life Sciences.
Create a strong coaching culture with frequent deal reviews, ride-alongs, and structured 1:1s that elevate performance.
Define and refine the GTM strategy for Life Sciences accounts, aligned to our evolving territory and account coverage model.
Drive territory design, account prioritization, and coverage approaches that balance new customer acquisition with strategic expansion.
Establish clear operating rhythms for pipeline and forecast management, with explicit expectations on activity, coverage, and deal quality.
Hold the team accountable for building and closing high-quality, multi-stakeholder, multi-product opportunities that materially impact revenue.
Guide reps through complex, technical, and often unstructured opportunities in regulated environments.
Help translate AI and API capabilities into business value for Life Sciences executives, partnering through regulatory, compliance, and data considerations (e.g., clinical data workflows, GxP/FDA/EMA contexts).
Partner with Marketing to shape the Life Sciences story, campaigns, and events that generate qualified pipeline — and provide clear, data-driven feedback on what is and isn’t working.
Provide structured, prioritized feedback to Product on customer use cases, feature gaps, and deal blockers to inform roadmap, packaging, and pricing decisions.
Partner with Finance on deal structures, commercial terms, and approvals that balance customer needs with OpenAI’s revenue, margin, and risk objectives.
Work closely with Technical Success and post-sales teams to co-design solutions, align on implementation expectations, and ensure smooth handoffs that set customers up for long-term success.