Account Executive, Life Sciences San Francisco, CA

Goodfire; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Market competitive salary

Equity

Competitive benefits

Job summary

Goodfire is seeking an Account Executive for Life Sciences in San Francisco to establish partnerships with organizations using AI to innovate drug discovery and clinical development.

This high-autonomy role involves managing strategic sales cycles, addressing customer needs, and translating technical challenges into opportunities. Candidates should demonstrate a strong understanding of life sciences and excellent communication skills.

The position offers a market competitive salary, equity, and benefits as part of a mission-driven team.

Qualifications

• Experience owning and closing complex sales cycles with technical, scientific, or research-oriented buyers.
• Ability to learn AI/ML and life sciences concepts quickly and communicate credibly.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.

Responsibilities

• Own strategic Life Sciences sales cycles: build pipeline and close new partnerships.
• Translate scientific needs into commercial opportunities.
• Partner with the Field Team to shape pilots and technical scopes.

Skills

Sales cycle management

Technical curiosity

Commercial judgment

Communication skills

Job description

Goodfire is a research company using interpretability to understand, learn from, and design AI systems. Our mission is to build the next generation of safe and powerful AI—not by scaling alone, but by understanding the intelligence we're building.

Scaling has proven powerful, but today's approach is fundamentally limited: we can't meaningfully understand, debug, or shape what models learn. Every engineering discipline has been gated by fundamental science and AI is at that inflection point now.

We're advancing the science of how AI systems actually work. Treating models as black boxes is an unnecessary handicap—we have access to the structures inside them, and understanding those structures lets us steer what models learn, make them safer and more useful, and extract the vast knowledge they contain. Our goal is to make AI that can be understood, debugged, and shaped like software.

Goodfire is a public benefit corporation headquartered in San Francisco with a team of the world’s top interpretability researchers and engineers from organizations like OpenAI and DeepMind. We're backed by over $200M from B Capital, Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed, Eric Schmidt, and others.

About the role

We're looking for an Account Executive, Life Sciences to create and close strategic partnerships with the teams using AI to transform drug discovery, biology, clinical development, and the broader life sciences ecosystem. This role demands consultative selling ability, technical curiosity, and domain judgment: the ability to understand how life sciences organizations are building models and where Goodfire can create concrete value.

This is a high-autonomy role where you will help define our Life Sciences go-to-market motion from the ground up. You will own strategic accounts end to end: identifying high-potential organizations, building relationships with technical and executive buyers, partnering with the Field Team to scope pilots, negotiating commercial terms, and expanding successful engagements into long-term partnerships.

Our buyers are Heads of AI, CTOs, research leaders, and technical executives inside organizations trying to use frontier models in high-stakes scientific workflows. You'll need to be thoughtful, technically curious, direct, and credible enough to earn trust with people applying AI to some of the most complex problems in the world.

Key responsibilities

• Own strategic Life Sciences sales cycles: build pipeline, run discovery, navigate technical and executive stakeholders, negotiate agreements, and close new partnerships
• Develop rigorous account strategy: identify where Goodfire can create value across pharma, biotech, research organizations, AI-native life sciences companies, and adjacent scientific teams
• Translate scientific and technical needs into commercial opportunities: understand customer workflows, model development challenges, validation requirements, and internal buying dynamics
• Partner with the Field Team: shape pilots, technical scopes, success criteria, and expansion paths that demonstrate real impact for life sciences customers
• Bring market signal back to the company: share customer needs, objections, competitive context, and emerging use cases with product, research, marketing, and leadership

Required experience

• Experience owning and closing complex sales cycles with technical, scientific, or research-oriented buyers.
• Strong discovery, commercial judgment, and ability to connect a technical product to a concrete customer problem.
• Ability to learn AI/ML and life sciences concepts quickly and communicate credibly with researchers, engineers, CTOs, Heads of AI, and scientific leaders.
• High agency, strong written and verbal communication, and comfort operating without a fully mature sales playbook.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience selling AI/ML, data platforms, scientific software, infrastructure, developer tools, or enterprise products into life sciences organizations.
• Familiarity with pharma, biotech, computational biology, drug discovery, clinical development, or scientific research workflows.
• Experience as an early AE or founding GTM hire at a high-growth startup where you helped define the sales motion.
• Experience with land-and-expand motions involving pilots, technical validation, services, or platform adoption.

Our values

Goodfire is looking for individuals who embody our values and share our deep commitment to making interpretability accessible. We are building a team first and foremost.

Put mission and team first

All we do is in service of our mission. We trust each other, deeply care about the success of the organization, and choose to put our team above ourselves.

Improve constantly

We are constantly looking to improve every piece of the business. We proactively critique ourselves and others in a kind and thoughtful way that translates to practical improvements in the organization. We are pragmatic and consistently implement the obvious fixes that work.

Take ownership and initiative

There are no bystanders here. We proactively identify problems and take full responsibility over getting a strong result. We are self-driven, own our mistakes, and feel deep responsibility over what we’re building.

Action today

We have a small amount of time to do something incredibly hard and meaningful. The pace and intensity of the organization is high. If we can take action today or tomorrow, we will choose to do it today.

Where we work

We are hiring for this position in our San Francisco HQ. We are in person 5 days a week, with one company-wide remote week per month.

What we offer

This role offers market competitive salary, equity, and competitive benefits.

Most importantly, you'll have the opportunity to join a vital mission at an important point in its trajectory — we are developing groundbreaking technology with a world-class team on the critical path to ensuring a safe and beneficial future for humanity. If you want to do your life’s work with us, even if you believe you do not meet every single requirement, apply now.