OpenAI

Research Engineer / Research Scientist- Personal AGI (Post Training) at OpenAI (San Francisco, CA)

OpenAI· San Francisco, CA· $380k–$500k·

Role details

Salary
$380k–$500k
Employment
Full-Time
Equity
Yes
Skills
Machine LearningReinforcement LearningModel EvaluationCode Debugging
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

Research and develop improvements to pre-trained models for deployment into ChatGPT and APIs. The role involves owning research agendas, collaborating with product teams, building robust evaluations, and debugging code within a hybrid work environment in San Francisco.

Job description

About the Team

The Personal AGI team is responsible for training and improving pre-trained models to be deployed into ChatGPT, the API, and potential future products. The team partners closely with research and product teams across the company, and conducts research as a final step to prepare for real world deployment to millions of users, ensuring that our models are safe, efficient, and reliable.

About the Role

As a Research Engineer / Scientist, you will research and develop improvements to our models. Our team works in research areas combining reinforcement learning and products. We're looking for individuals with strong ML engineering skills and research experience, especially with novel and highly capable models. An ideal candidate is passionate about product-driven research. 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 will:

  • Own and pursue a research agenda to improve model capability and performance.
  • Collaborate closely with the other research and product teams, allowing customers to optimize their own models.
  • Build robust evaluations for tracking modeling improvements.
  • Design, implement, test, and debug code across our research stack.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have a deep understanding of machine learning and machine learning applications.
  • Have a working knowledge of relevant models, and building evaluations for model capability improvement.
  • Are comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug.
  • Thrive in a dynamic and technically complex environment.

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