Sales Manager, Life Sciences

About the teamOpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. Our Go-To-Market (GTM) team helps organizations understand, adopt, and scale our AI products across their business — from ChatGPT Enterprise to our developer platform and APIs.The Enterprise Sales organization partners with the world’s largest companies to build new AI-powered customer experiences, transform operations, and reimagine how work gets done. We are expanding our industry focus across Financial Services, Retail, and other strategic industries while deepening our expertise and repeatable playbooks in Life Sciences.About the roleAs 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.In this role, you willRecruit, 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.What we’re looking for15+ 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.You might thrive in this role if youHave direct Life Sciences experience — selling into pharma, biotech, medtech, diagnostics, CROs, or research institutions ... (truncated, view full listing at source)