OpenAI

Researcher, Training at OpenAI (San Francisco, CA)

OpenAI· San Francisco, CA· $300k–$600k·

Role details

Salary
$300k–$600k
Employment
Full-Time
Equity
Yes
Skills
LLM architecturesModel inferenceDeep learningTransformer modificationsExperimentationDebuggingOptimizationLLM training run contributionsLLM deployment
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

Design, prototype, and scale new LLM architectures to improve intelligence, efficiency, and capabilities for flagship models. The role involves autonomous experiment execution, performance optimization, and contributing to training and inference infrastructure.

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI's Training team is responsible for producing the large language models that power our research, our products, and ultimately bring us closer to AGI. Achieving this goal requires combining deep research into improving our current architecture, datasets and optimization techniques, alongside long-term bets aimed at improving the efficiency and capability of future generations of models. We are responsible for integrating these techniques and producing model artifacts used by the rest of the company, and ensuring that these models are world-class in every respect. Recent examples of artifacts with major contributions from our team include GPT4-Turbo, GPT-4o and o1-mini.

About the Role

As a member of the architecture team, you will push the frontier of architecture development for OpenAI's flagship models, enhancing intelligence, efficiency, and adding new capabilities. Ideal candidates have a deep understanding of LLM architectures, a sophisticated understanding of model inference, and a hands-on empirical approach. A good fit for this role will be equally happy coming up with a creative breakthrough, investing in strengthening a baseline, designing an eval, debugging a thorny regression, or tracking down a bottleneck. This role is based in San Francisco. 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:

  • Design, prototype and scale up new architectures to improve model intelligence
  • Execute and analyze experiments autonomously and collaboratively
  • Study, debug, and optimize both model performance and computational performance
  • Contribute to training and inference infrastructure

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have experience landing contributions to major LLM training runs
  • Can thoroughly evaluate and improve deep learning architectures in a self-directed fashion
  • Are motivated by safely deploying LLMs in the real world
  • Are well-versed in the state of the art transformer modifications for efficiency

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