--- title: 'Machine Learning Engineer, Growth at OpenAI' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/machine-learning-engineer-growth-openai-san-francisco-braj004981j2' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-15' --- # Machine Learning Engineer, Growth at OpenAI - **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai) - **Location:** San Francisco, CA - **Compensation:** $381k–$423k - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-10-13 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/70042d81-4db6-4c5c-bdb2-76c133ee2917 ## Job description ## About the team The Growth team drives user and revenue growth across ChatGPT’s consumer and business segments and other OpenAI products worldwide. We work across the full funnel—from awareness and acquisition through activation, retention, and expansion—using experimentation, data science, machine learning, and product engineering to help more people discover and realize durable value from OpenAI’s products. Our team partners closely with Product, Engineering, Data Science, Design, Finance, Lifecycle, and Growth Marketing. We move quickly, test rigorously, and hold a high bar for measurement, privacy, reliability, and user trust. About this role: We are looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to build the models and decision systems that optimize paid marketing investment for ChatGPT and other OpenAI products. You will develop budget allocation and control algorithms that determine where to invest, how quickly to spend, and how to adjust as performance changes. The challenge is to make reliable decisions from noisy, delayed, and incomplete signals. You will combine machine learning, optimization, and experimentation to improve incremental growth and long-term user value within budget and efficiency constraints. You will own this work from problem formulation and prototyping through deployment, evaluation, and ongoing operation. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to eligible employees. In this role, you will: - Build budget allocation algorithms. Decide how to distribute investment across channels, campaigns, and markets using estimates of marginal returns, while accounting for diminishing returns, uncertainty, and business constraints. - Develop spend pacing and adaptive control systems. Adjust budgets and spending rates as performance changes, balancing responsiveness with stability when feedback is delayed or noisy. Build in spend limits, monitoring, and safe fallback behavior. - Model marketing response and user value. Develop forecasts and models of conversion, long-term value, and saturation that help determine where the next dollar can have the greatest impact. - Evaluate decisions rigorously. Use simulations, backtesting, and online experiments to test allocation and control policies. Partner with Data Science to measure incrementality and validate whether offline improvements translate into better investment outcomes. - Own reliable production systems. Build data pipelines, training and inference workflows, and integrations that turn model outputs into budget decisions. Establish data-quality checks, monitoring, and retraining with thoughtful treatment of privacy and consent. - Turn business goals into optimization problems. Partner with Growth Marketing, Data Science, Engineering, and Finance to define objectives and constraints, communicate tradeoffs, and use evidence to improve investment decisions. - Help build a diverse and inclusive culture where people feel welcome, challenge assumptions, and collaborate with candor and respect. You might thrive in this role if you: - 5+ years of experience as a Machine Learning Engineer, Applied Scientist, Data Scientist, or in a comparable quantitative engineering role, or an equivalent record of impact. - Experience building and operating production ML or quantitative decision systems, from problem formulation and data pipelines through deployment, experimentation, and monitoring. - Strong software engineering skills, proficiency in Python and SQL, and hands-on experience with ML frameworks and large-scale data systems. - Strong foundations in machine learning and statistics, with experience applying optimization or control methods to decisions under uncertainty. - Experience evaluating models or algorithms with noisy, delayed, or incomplete data, and the judgment to balance model quality, causal impact, and operational reliability. - The ability to turn ambiguous goals into focused experiments, interpret mixed results, and communicate clear decisions with technical and non-technical partners. - A collaborative working style and a commitment to deploying AI responsibly, in service of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. ## About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see [OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf). Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology. ## About OpenAI ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. - **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO. - **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA - **Founded**: 2015 - **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment - **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models) - **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity. ## Products & Services - **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows. - **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.). - **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions. - **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system. - **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026). ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials. - **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”). - **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. - **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models. ## Competitive Advantages - **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI. - **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent. - **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference. - **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products. ## Strategic Focus - **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance). - **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses. - **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026). - **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity. ## Why Work Here - **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus. - **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget. - **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI. - **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications. ## Sources 1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/) 2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/) 3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search) 4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/) ## Other roles at OpenAI - [Strategy & Operations Lead — SEA & ANZ](https://feeny.ai/job/strategy-operations-lead-sea-anz-openai-singapore-a6pm94k6qqsy) — Singapore - [Client Platform Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/client-platform-engineer-openai-san-francisco-pat12pc927cq) — San Francisco, CA - [Enterprise Security Engineer, Vulnerability Management](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-security-engineer-vulnerability-management-openai-san-francisco-h3ej6emmjazm) — San Francisco, CA - [Marketplace Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/marketplace-lead-openai-new-york-fhs68bg43ftx) — New York, NY - [B2B Ecosystem Lead, Business Development](https://feeny.ai/job/b2b-ecosystem-lead-business-development-openai-san-francisco-y31vpy889d0y) — San Francisco, CA - [Applied AI Engineer, Startups](https://feeny.ai/job/applied-ai-engineer-startups-openai-sao-paulo-wgjmry3b90sn) — São Paulo, Brazil - [Experiential Producer](https://feeny.ai/job/experiential-producer-openai-san-francisco-43m6e9w9k2rh) — San Francisco, CA - [Creative Director, Art](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-director-art-openai-san-francisco-m9ce3hvapsfz) — San Francisco, CA - [Motion Designer, Business Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/motion-designer-business-marketing-openai-san-francisco-gtbt12733436) — San Francisco, CA - [Creative Delivery Director, Business Marketing](https://feeny.ai/job/creative-delivery-director-business-marketing-openai-san-francisco-vb9j81xmyyph) — San Francisco, CA