OpenAI

Model Designer at OpenAI (San Francisco, CA)

OpenAI· San Francisco, CA· $266k–$295k·

Role details

Salary
$266k–$295k
Work type
Hybrid
Employment
Full-Time
Equity
Yes
Skills
Model DesignData AnalysisUser Experience DesignAI Research
Benefits

Equity · Relocation Assistance

OpenAI at a glance

Builds frontier AI models and ships them as consumer, developer, and enterprise products — ChatGPT, the API platform, and Codex.

Builds frontier AI models and ships them as consumer, developer, and enterprise products (ChatGPT, the OpenAI API platform, Codex, and an agent layer).

~$180B raised · latest: $122B round at an $852B valuation (2026) · backed by Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, SoftBank

Summary

The Model Designer collaborates with researchers and product teams to shape how AI models interact with users. This role involves designing model behavior, improving data collection strategies, and defining new human-AI interaction paradigms to enhance user experience and trust.

Job description

About the Team

The Core Models team shapes how our models interact with people. We view the model as the product itself, aiming for intuitive experiences that exceed user expectations and feel like magic.

About the Role

As a Model Designer, you’ll have an outsized impact on how our models interact and resonate with users. You’ll strike a delicate balance between maximizing the model’s capabilities, reading in between the lines in user queries to understand how best to help, and upholding user trust. We’re looking for people who are passionate about the intersection of design, technology, and user experience — and are up for the challenge of defining new human-AI interaction paradigms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you’ll join a small team in evolving and expanding the model design function. You will:

  • Collaborate closely with researchers to understand, predict, and design model behavior.
  • Partner with product managers and designers across the company to ensure a cohesive voice and approach.
  • Proactively identify ways to improve our models based on product sense, user feedback, quantitative insights, and the research roadmap.
  • Come up with creative strategies for collecting high-quality data.
  • Do whatever needs to be done to make our models better.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Possess exceptional taste, creativity, and writing skills, allowing you to craft responses that delight users.
  • Don’t mind ambiguity — you’re happy to throw yourself into a new, unfamiliar environment, build relationships, define a problem, and make progress.
  • Love experimentation, and are willing to test and reject new ideas when the results don’t pan out.
  • Exhibit high levels of empathy and self-awareness required to serve everyone in the world.
  • Enjoy tackling profound and often philosophical questions while always driving towards clarity.
  • Demonstrate technical intuition to learn how changes in data can affect overall model behavior.

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. 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. 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. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy 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.

Why work at OpenAI

  • 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.

Application questions