---
title: 'Researcher, Misalignment Monitoring Lead at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/researcher-misalignment-monitoring-lead-openai-san-francisco-dr2tat5ay7vv'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-11-05'
---

# Researcher, Misalignment Monitoring Lead at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA
- **Compensation:** $380k–$500k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Posted:** 2026-10-22
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-11-05
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/c955617d-f465-4f7a-b57c-98284fd14777

## Job description

## About the Team

OpenAI's Safety Research organization works to ensure that our most capable AI models can be deployed safely and responsibly. As frontier models become increasingly capable and autonomous, developing reliable ways to monitor their behavior, identify emerging risks, and evaluate the effectiveness of safety systems becomes increasingly important. Our work focuses on advancing the research and evaluation methods needed to understand model behavior and ensure that monitoring systems remain effective as model capabilities evolve. We combine rigorous empirical research with practical safety interventions, working closely with research, engineering, and deployment teams to translate findings into improvements across OpenAI's models and products.

## About the Role

We are looking for a senior researcher to lead technical work on misalignment monitoring for frontier AI systems. You will develop methods to evaluate the effectiveness of AI monitors, understand their limitations, and improve our ability to detect and stop concerning model behavior reliably. This role combines research leadership with hands-on technical execution. You will set research priorities, design rigorous evaluations, investigate monitoring failures, and develop approaches for stress-testing and improving monitoring systems. A key focus will be understanding where monitors produce false positives, miss important behaviors, or become less effective as models grow more capable. You will work closely with researchers and engineers across OpenAI to turn monitoring research into practical improvements to our safety systems. We are looking for someone with strong research judgment, technical depth, and the ability to independently drive ambiguous problems from initial investigation through measurable results. In this role, you will:

- Lead the research and technical direction for evaluating and improving the misalignment monitoring of frontier AI systems.
- Design and execute rigorous evaluations that measure monitor effectiveness, identify failure modes, and assess the reliability of monitoring signals.
- Develop methods to stress-test and red-team monitors, including identifying behaviors that evade detection or expose weaknesses in existing approaches.
- Investigate false positives, missed detections, and other monitoring failures to improve the accuracy and usefulness of safety evaluations.
- Build scalable evaluation frameworks and experimental tools that enable ongoing measurement of monitoring performance as model capabilities evolve.
- Translate research findings into actionable improvements, working with partner teams to strengthen monitoring systems and inform broader safety decisions.
- Establish research priorities and guide technical execution, balancing foundational research questions with practical deployment needs.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Have a strong background in machine learning research, particularly in model evaluations, AI safety, alignment, robustness, or related areas.
- Have demonstrated the ability to lead technically challenging research projects, from identifying important questions through designing experiments and delivering results.
- Bring strong experimental judgment and understand how to design evaluations that are rigorous, reproducible, and difficult to game.
- Have hands-on experience building or evaluating machine learning systems, including working with large language models or other frontier AI systems.
- Enjoy investigating complex failure modes and developing methods to distinguish meaningful safety signals from misleading measurements.
- Are comfortable working on open-ended research problems where the right methodology or success criteria may not be obvious at the outset.
- Combine strong research instincts with practical engineering ability and can independently build experiments, analyze results, and iterate quickly.
- Communicate technical findings clearly and enjoy collaborating across research, engineering, and safety teams.
- Are motivated by OpenAI's mission and the challenge of developing reliable oversight mechanisms for increasingly capable AI systems.

Nice to have:

- Experience with AI monitoring, automated evaluations, adversarial testing, or red-teaming.
- Research experience in scalable oversight, AI control, model behavior analysis, or interpretability.
- Experience developing monitoring or evaluation systems that are used in real-world deployments.
- A track record of technical research leadership, including mentoring researchers or coordinating cross-functional research initiatives.

## 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/)

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