About this role
Leading the engineering team building Rosalind Workbench involves guiding the development of scientific interfaces, agent and tool orchestration, local and remote compute, durable execution, and persistent project state. The OpenAI Life Sciences team operates at the intersection of advancing frontier life sciences model capabilities and building products that help researchers accelerate their work through artificial intelligence.
Daily responsibilities include hiring and developing engineers, setting technical direction, reviewing architecture and code, and turning an ambitious product roadmap into reliable releases. The position requires close collaboration with product, design, research, Codex engineering, and customer-facing teams to bring new scientific capabilities into everyday use. Candidates who thrive here are comfortable with ambiguous situations, possess strong software engineering fundamentals, and care deeply about product usability and scientific discovery.
What you will do
- Hire strong engineers, coach technical leaders, provide clear feedback, and establish ownership across product and infrastructure work.
- Translate scientific and customer needs into scoped milestones while making explicit tradeoffs and resolving dependencies.
- Guide development across scientific interfaces, agent and tool orchestration, local and remote compute, durable execution, and persistent project state.
- Preserve inputs, versions, results, and decisions behind an analysis to ensure scientific work remains inspectable and reproducible.
- Establish testing, release practices, observability, and an effective on-call process to own engineering quality in production.
- Align with Codex on shared platform capabilities and lead technical decisions regarding scientific tools, specialist models, and data sources.
- Partner with security, privacy, and safety teams to implement appropriate access controls, review points, auditability, and retention policies.
What you need
- Bring experience managing engineering teams that ship and operate complex software products.
- Demonstrate strong software engineering fundamentals and technical judgment across user-facing applications, backend services, data systems, and compute infrastructure.
- Possess experience helping turn early prototypes or research capabilities into reliable products used by external customers.
- Create clarity in ambiguous situations, communicate technical decisions plainly, and coordinate teams with different priorities.
- Care deeply about product usability and translate expert workflows into software that users can understand, inspect, and trust.
Nice to have
- Scientific software, computational biology, bioinformatics, chemistry, or laboratory workflows
- AI agents, model inference, tool integrations, or evaluation infrastructure
- Workflow orchestration, long-running jobs, reproducible computation, or artifact versioning
- Enterprise software deployed with private data, customer-managed infrastructure, and organizational access controls
- Developer platforms that let users build, validate, and share reusable tools or workflows
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the compensation for this role?
The salary range for this position is $401K – $536K with offers of equity included. Additional details can be discussed during the hiring process.
Where is the position located?
The role is based in San Francisco. Candidates will work from this location in coordination with the engineering and research teams.
What will I be working on?
You will lead the team building Rosalind Workbench and its supporting infrastructure. This involves hiring engineers, setting technical direction, and bringing new scientific capabilities into everyday use.