Senior Counsel, Commercial (Health and Life Sciences)

About the Team

OpenAI’s Legal team plays a crucial role in advancing our mission by tackling innovative and fundamental legal issues in AI. The team includes professionals from diverse legal fields – technology, AI, infrastructure, privacy, IP, corporate, employment, tax, regulatory, and litigation – who collaborate closely with colleagues across the company.

If you are passionate about being a technology lawyer working on cutting-edge challenges, you’ll thrive here.

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced attorney to join our commercial legal team. Based in the US, you will help lead commercial legal support for OpenAI’s rapidly growing business, working with teams such as GTM, Partnerships, Procurement, Finance, Product, Infrastructure, and Engineering.

This is a great opportunity to join OpenAI’s commercial legal team, negotiating high-impact agreements and helping to build scalable frameworks for responsible growth.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA, where we follow a hybrid schedule of 3 days in the office per week. Remote candidates will also be considered, and we offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

- Serve as the legal partner for OpenAI’s business transactions, partnerships, and operations, with a focus on life sciences.

- Provide practical, business-oriented legal advice to teams including Go-to-Market, Partnerships, and Research.

- Draft, structure, and negotiate complex commercial agreements with enterprise customers, vendors, and strategic partners, including transactions involving life sciences.

- Identify and coordinate issues involving intellectual property, privacy, security, regulatory requirements, and product use with the appropriate specialist teams.

- Lead negotiations and manage multiple stakeholders, escalating consequential issues with clear options and recommendations.

- Develop and improve templates, playbooks, processes, and training that make routine contracting more efficient and consistent.

- Monitor and advise on regulatory and compliance matters affecting AI and technology in life sciences.

- Collaborate with colleagues across OpenAI’s global legal team to ensure alignment across jurisdictions.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have 10+ years of relevant legal experience, including substantial responsibility for drafting and negotiating complex commercial agreements.

- Have experience with life sciences transactions.

- Are familiar with HIPAA and transactions involving health data.

- Can translate legal and commercial complexity into clear, actionable advice for business stakeholders and senior leaders.

- Exercise sound judgment, take ownership, and move matters forward when facts are incomplete or circumstances change.

- Build trust across functions and can communicate a principled position while working constructively toward a solution.

- Enjoy improving processes and creating practical tools that help a growing team scale.

- Are curious about technology and motivated to learn about AI and its commercial implications.