Research Engineer, Human-Centered AI

About the Team

OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that our AI systems are safe, trustworthy, useful, and consistently aligned with human values, even as they scale in complexity and capability. Our research focuses on methods that help AI reliably follow human intent in diverse scenarios—including adversarial or high-stakes settings—and ultimately maximize its benefit to individuals and society.

A critical component of our approach involves leveraging high-quality human and synthetic data to train and evaluate models, ensuring alignment techniques remain effective as capabilities grow. We work with experts across domains and modalities to develop scalable methods for generating high-quality data, and using it to produce safe and useful models.

The two pillars of our approach are: (1) harnessing improved capabilities into alignment, making sure that our alignment techniques improve, rather than break, as capabilities grow, and (2) centering humans by developing mechanisms and interfaces that enable humans to both express their intent and to effectively supervise and control AIs, even in highly complex situations.

We're looking for individuals with strong ML engineering skills, research experience, and a deep understanding of Human-Machine Interaction challenges, especially with novel and highly capable models.

About the Role
As a Research Engineer, you will:

• Research and model mechanisms that create value for people, with an emphasis on explaining or predicting preferences, behaviors, and satisfaction.

• Quantify the nuances of human behavior and capture them in data-driven systems, whether by designing advanced labeling tasks or analyzing user feedback patterns

• Design robust evaluations for measuring alignment and real-world utility, iterating quickly to uncover what makes certain feedback and training protocols more effective.

• Design and evaluate new Human-AI-interaction paradigms and scalable oversight methods that redefine how humans interact with, understand, and supervise our models.

• Develop and evaluate alignment capabilities that are subjective, context-dependent, and hard to measure.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience with machine learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch) and are comfortable experimenting with large-scale models.

• Enjoy moving fluidly between high-level research questions and low-level implementation details, adapting methods to solve ambiguous, dynamic problems.

• Are goal-oriented instead of method-oriented, and are not afraid of tedious but high-value work when needed.

• Have an interest or background in cognitive science, computational linguistics, human-computer interaction, or social sciences. 

• Are strongly motivated by OpenAI’s mission of building safe, universally beneficial AGI and are aligned with OpenAI’s charter

• Want to work on systems that balance breakthrough capabilities with robust alignment, ultimately shaping a safer and more human-centered AI landscape.

• Excel in fast-paced, collaborative, and cutting-edge research environments.

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 .

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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 .

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.

Compensation

$310K – $380K + Offers Equity