Research Engineer

By applying to this role, you will be considered for Research Engineer roles across all teams at OpenAI. About the Role As a Research Engineer here, you will be responsible for building AI systems that can perform previously impossible tasks or achieve unprecedented levels of performance. We're looking for people with solid engineering skills (for example designing, implementing, and improving a massive-scale distributed machine learning system), writing bug-free machine learning code, and building the science behind the algorithms employed. The most outstanding deep learning results are increasingly attained at a massive scale, and these results require engineers who are comfortable working in large distributed systems. We expect engineering to play a key role in most major advances in AI of the future. We expect you to: Have strong programming skills Have experience working in large distributed systems Be excited about OpenAI’s approach to research Nice to have: Interested in and thoughtful about the impacts of AI technology Past experience in creating high-performance implementations of deep learning algorithms 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

About us Sierra is the leading platform for customer-facing AI agents, working with many of the world's biggest brands — including The GAP, Rocket Mortgage, SoFi, Sutter Health, and SoftBank — to transform how they serve customers and grow their businesses. We are primarily an in-person company based in San Francisco, with growing offices across North America, Europe, and Asia. We are guided by a set of values that are at the core of our actions and define our culture: Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and a commitment to balancing Family along the way. These values are the foundation of our work, and we are committed to upholding them in everything we do. Our co-founders are Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor . Bret currently serves as Board Chair of OpenAI. Previously, he was co-CEO of Salesforce (which had acquired the company he founded, Quip) and CTO of Facebook. Bret was also one of Google's earliest product managers and co-creator of Google Maps. Before founding Sierra, Clay spent 18 years at Google, where he most recently led Google Labs. Earlier, he started and led Google’s AR/VR effort, Project Starline, and Google Lens. Before that, Clay led the product and design teams for Google Workspace. Sierra’s Applied Research team advances the quality, speed, and cost efficiency of the models powering our agents across a wide range of tasks. Our work spans post-training open-weight models for specialized capabilities and pioneering new approaches to voice AI, turning research breakthroughs into reliable production systems. What you’ll do Tackle unsolved applied AI and ML problems. Pushing the boundaries of post-training, voice AI, and long-horizon task execution, building agents that can reason, adapt, and reliably carry out complex tasks for customers. Determine when to build specialized models and when to use externally provided frontier intelligence, balancing quality, speed, and cost to deliver customer value. Turn ambiguous product and customer pro

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

About the Team The Personalization-Memory team, within OpenAI's broader Personal AGI organization, is focused on developing agents that can learn from prior interactions in order to become more helpful and efficient over time. We build general-purpose memory and personalization capabilities that transfer across ChatGPT and other agentic products, and we collaborate with applied engineering on the product surfaces that allow users to interact with memory. About the Role As a Research Engineer / Research Scientist on the Personalization-Memory team, you will research and develop improvements to memory usage and personalization in OpenAI's frontier models. Our team works on reinforcement learning, dataset creation, evaluations, and other post-training methods. We partner closely with research and product teams across the company to realize the vision of a truly personalized ChatGPT. We're looking for individuals who have a background in frontier model post-training, are able to iterate quickly, and who are 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 for improving memory use and personalization in frontier models. Build robust evaluations for tracking modeling improvements. Design, implement, test, and debug code across our research stack. Collaborate closely with the research and product teams to influence the shape of technical solutions in the product. You might thrive in this role if you: Are passionate about personalization and building personalized assistants. Have experience working with user signals and human data to turn feedback into reliable signals for training and evaluation. Have a deep understanding of frontier model post-training and machine learning applications. Value principled approaches and research craftsmanship. Are comfortable diving into a lar

About the Team The RL and Reasoning team drives the core reasoning paradigm and has created groundbreaking innovations such as o1 and o3. They focus on pushing the boundaries of reinforcement learning research, building next-generation generative models, and deploying them at scale. About the Role As a Research Engineer/Research Scientist at OpenAI, you will advance the frontier of AI alignment and capabilities through cutting-edge RL methods. Your work will sit at the heart of training intelligent, aligned, and general-purpose agents, including the systems that power various models. We’re looking for people who have a background in reinforcement learning research, are able to iterate quickly, and are proficient at coding. 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. You might thrive in this role if: You love being on the cutting edge of RL and language model research. You’re a self-starter who takes initiative and ownership of ideas, driving them to completion. You value principled approaches, simple experiments in tightly-controlled settings, and reaching trustworthy conclusions which stand the test of time. You thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic, and technically complex environment where rapid iteration is key. You’re comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug and improve it. You have a deep understanding of machine learning and machine learning applications. 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 ful

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. In the Model Experience team, we shape the default character and behavior of ChatGPT: how the model communicates, responds to users, uses its capabilities, and behaves across different contexts and languages. Our goal is to make every interaction with ChatGPT thoughtful, helpful, and trustworthy. We take an opinionated view of what good human–AI interaction should look like, then turn that vision into real model behavior through human data, evaluations, reward models, and post-training. Our work sits at the intersection of research, product, and model design. We partner closely with teams across OpenAI to conduct research and ensure our models are thoughtful, safe, reliable to serve millions of users. 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 and the quality of human-AI interaction. 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 good judgment about model behavior and can communicate this judgment effec