Researcher, Alignment

About the Team The Interpretability team studies internal representations of deep learning models. We are interested in using representations to understand model behavior, and in engineering models to have more understandable representations. We are particularly interested in applying our understanding to ensure the alignment of powerful AI systems. Our working style is collaborative and curiosity-driven. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a researcher passionate about understanding deep networks, with a strong background in engineering, quantitative reasoning, and the research process. You will develop and carry out a research plan in mechanistic interpretability, in close collaboration with a highly motivated team. You will play a critical role in helping OpenAI ensure future models remain safe even as they grow in capability. This will make a significant impact on our goal of building and deploying safe AGI. In this role, you will: Develop and publish research on techniques for understanding representations of deep networks. Engineer infrastructure for studying model internals at scale. Collaborate across teams to work on projects that OpenAI is uniquely suited to pursue. Guide research directions toward demonstrable usefulness and/or long-term scalability. You might thrive in this role if you: Are excited about OpenAI’s mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity, and are aligned with OpenAI’s charter . Show enthusiasm for long-term AI safety & alignment, and have thought deeply about technical paths to safe AGI. Bring experience in the field of AI safety & alignment, mechanistic interpretability, or spiritually related disciplines. Hold a Ph.D. or have research experience in computer science, machine learning, or a related field. Thrive in environments involving large-scale AI systems, and are excited to make use of OpenAI’s unique resources in this area. Possess 2+ years of research engineering experience and proficiency in Python or similar languag

About the Team The CoT Monitorability team at OpenAI studies whether and when the chain-of-thought of frontier reasoning models is monitorable enough to support scalable oversight. We study how to measure monitorability , which training mechanisms affect monitorability, and speculative methods to improve monitorability. While we mostly focus on CoT monitorability at the moment, we care more generally about any form of monitorability, auditing methods, and improving alignment. We were the first to show that chain-of-thought monitoring can be a practical additional safety mechanism, and today our monitoring systems are actively used on OpenAI’s largest RL training runs to detect misbehavior. The issues we surface are then used to help improve our reward functions, environments, etc (without directly training against a CoT monitor). Our work sits in Alignment and intersects with model training, alignment evaluations, monitoring, and frontier-risk research.We care most about monitorability where the stakes are high, and about preserving useful oversight signals as models become more capable. About the Role We’re looking for a researcher with strong empirical ML expertise and a deep interest in model behavior, alignment, or interpretability. Direct chain-of-thought interpretability experience is welcome but not required; strong candidates may come from broader interpretability, alignment, model training, or investigative model-behavior work. As a researcher on the Alignment team, you will design and run experiments that improve our understanding of model monitorability. You will investigate how training interventions across the model-development pipeline influence whether reasoning remains legible, build evaluations that make those questions measurable, and help translate findings into practical oversight and training recommendations. You may also help develop new monitoring models or methods and apply them to OpenAI’s largest training runs. This role is especially well

About the Team Models are becoming increasingly capable—moving from tools that assist humans to agents that can plan, execute, and adapt in the real world. Mitigating the frontier risks resulting from these capabilities is paramount to OpenAI’s ability to continue deploying models safely. The Preparedness team is dedicated to addressing these critical risks. Our work includes: Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems. Mitigation. Keeping misuse and misalignment safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future. Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework , and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets. This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society. About the Role We are seeking exceptional researchers who can push the frontier of safety mitigations. You will help derisk frontier models by developing novel safety mitigations, developing and applying new techniques from domains like interpretability, control, and alignment to ensure the safety of OpenAI’s deployed models. You will play a critical role in defining how a safe AI system should look in the future at OpenAI, making a significant impact on our mission to build and deploy safe AGI. This role requires strong technical depth and close cross-functional collaboration to ensure our safety mitigations are enforceable, scalable, and effective. We seek researchers who can partner with experts across domains such as misalignment, cybersecurity, and biology in order to develop the best possible end-to-end safety stack. In this role, you will: Work on identifying emerging AI safety risks and new methodologies for exploring and mitigating the impact of such risks Build (and then continuously refine) the evaluations that enable us to assess the extent of these risks; this might include worki

About the Team The Agent Safety team works to ensure that increasingly capable AI agents act safely, exercise sound judgment, and remain aligned with user intent. Our mission is to reduce the probability of severe unintended outcomes from increasingly capable AI agents while preserving their ability to act effectively and autonomously. Our work spans three areas: Training: Create training methods, environments and data that teach agents to make better decisions in consequential situations. We turn real-world failures into training signals that prevent similar incidents, and identify precursor behaviors and mitigations to address emerging risks. Measurements: Build evaluations and production metrics that identify emerging risks and measure whether our interventions work. Oversight: Develop oversight and system mitigation mechanisms that reduce harmful actions while preserving useful autonomy (for example future versions of auto-review ). About the Role We’re looking for strong executors with excellent judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and an understanding of frontier model research. You don’t need prior safety or alignment experience, we also welcome people that recently realized that alignment and safety is a critical area to contribute to. 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: Train and evaluate frontier models to reduce harmful or misaligned agent actions, forming clear hypotheses and executing independently through ambiguity. Mine incidents and build scalable measurement, data-processing, and evaluation systems that turn real failures into repeatable safety signals. Collaborate closely with post-training, capabilities, oversight, and pre-training partners to ship research-backed mitigations into large-scale training and agent systems. You might thrive in this role if you: Have demonstrated strength in research engineering, ML en

About the Team The Synthetic RL team develops reinforcement learning methods that leverage synthetic data, environments, and feedback to train and evaluate frontier AI models. The team explores approaches such as self-play, simulators, and other synthetic evaluations to push model capability, generalization, and alignment beyond what is possible with the current prevailing methodology. About the Role As a Research Scientist on the Synthetic RL team, you will develop novel reinforcement learning techniques that use synthetic environments and feedback to improve large-scale models. You’ll work closely with other researchers to design experiments, analyze learning dynamics, and translate research insights into training approaches used in production systems. We’re looking for researchers who enjoy working on open-ended problems, value fast iteration, and want their work to directly shape how frontier models are trained. 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: Research and develop reinforcement learning algorithms Design and run experiments to study training dynamics and model behavior at scale Collaborate with engineers and researchers to integrate successful approaches into model training pipelines You might thrive in this role if you: Have a strong background in reinforcement learning, machine learning research, or related fields Have strong engineering and statistical analysis skills Enjoy exploring new problem spaces where data, objectives, and evaluation are imperfect or evolving Are motivated by seeing research ideas influence real-world AI systems 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 ex

About the team Models are becoming increasingly capable—moving from tools that assist humans to agents that can plan, execute, and adapt in the real world. Mitigating the frontier risks resulting from these capabilities is paramount to OpenAI’s ability to continue deploying models safely. The Preparedness team is dedicated to addressing these critical risks. Our work includes: Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems. Mitigation. Keeping misalignment safeguards, alignment tools, and on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future. Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework , and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets. This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society. About the role Preparedness is hiring strong technical executors to support preparations for accelerated AI development, which may culminate in recursive self-improvement. This work relies on anticipating misalignment risks that might exist in the future, but might not exist now; so it’s especially important that people in this role are tasteful and strategic. The role is wide-ranging, covering any mitigation for loss of control risk, spanning the design and implementation of better pre-deployment risk-assessment , control measures , RSI-relevant training interventions, and turning one’s technical work into established institutional practices and external-facing communications. Below is a subset of our focus areas: Scalable oversight: Establishing practices for model misbehavior monitoring and oversight which remain effective in superhuman model capability regimes, with a focus on bridging from today’s monitoring approaches to future-proof ones. Automated auditing: As model capabilities increase, we’ll increasingly rely on automated approaches for finding the most severe forms of model misalignments. We’ll both need to s