Ai Research Engineer in San Francisco

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. We are looking for an engineer with strong experience in machine learning and solid foundations in maths and computer science to join our growing Post-Training team at Baseten. Custom models are instrumental to the success of Baseten customers. By inference volume, the overwhelming majority of traffic at Baseten is to and from models that have been post-trained in some way, whether that be through reinforcement learning, supervised finetuning, a recent technique from the literature, or an in-house research technique from Baseten. The Post-Training team is responsible for the success of our customers’ post-trained models, and we employ a wide array of techniques to produce models that are more efficient and higher quality than even the biggest closed source models for the customer’s specific needs. Your role as a research engineer is to build the in-house tooling to support all of this. We care about training a wide spectrum of different model architectures with a variety of techniques efficiently and at scale. At times this involves zooming deep into a particular technical topic, but more often if involves working across the stack as a whole - systems-level concepts like Kubernetes, cgroups, storage systems, and networking topologies, as well as PyTorch distributed tensor computation, and GPU kernels. RECENT RESEARCH Dense, on-policy or both? Repeated kv cache for long-running agents Distillation without the dark – rep

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, your work will span memory architecture, post-training, and developing long-horizon tasks for training and evaluations. We're looking for individuals who have a background in reinforcement learning research, are able to iterate quickly, and who can convert scientific rigor and long-term research into realized product impact. 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 long-horizon memory 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: Love being on the cutting edge of RL and frontier model research. Value principled approaches and research craftsmanship. Are passionate about long-horizon tasks, memory, and turning your research into product impact. Are comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug. Thrive in a fast-paced, 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 syst

About the Team The Personality & Model Behavior team, within OpenAI’s broader Personal AGI team conducts research on how to shape personalities and guide the behavior of models. We think about topics such as emotional intelligence, reasoning, and how models interact thoughtfully with users. We’re particularly interested in understanding how individual users want ChatGPT to behave, and creating personalized models that feel uniquely tailored to each user. We integrate this research into ChatGPT and other OpenAI products that are used by hundreds of millions of users. About the Role We're looking for individuals with strong ML engineering skills and research experience, especially with novel and highly capable models, and in areas like reinforcement learning and reward modeling. An ideal candidate is passionate about product-driven research. In this role, you will: Conduct research around personalization, personality, and model behavior by leveraging and developing tools such as synthetic data, reward modeling, and reinforcement learning. Build robust evaluations and model training pipelines to facilitate our research. Innovate new post-training methods. 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: Have a deep understanding of machine learning and its applications. Have prior knowledge in training and optimizing models and building evaluations. Are willing to dive into large ML codebases to debug issues. Thrive in dynamic and technically complex environments. Have a track record of delivering innovative, out-of-the-box solutions to address real-world constraints. 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 o

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 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 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 Fleet team builds core components to enable productive research from small to state of the art scale across OpenAI, with the goal of accelerating progress towards AGI. We frequently collaborate with other teams to speed up the development of new state-of-the-art capabilities. About the Role As we scale up with more researchers and engineers joining OpenAI, we seek a pragmatic and passionate engineer with a strong focus on the development experience for both engineers and scientists. In this role, you will be responsible for building and maintaining systems that allow our research + engineering organization to iteratively develop, test, and deploy new features reliably, with high velocity, and with a frictionless and fast development cycle. You will help oversee and drive to the vision of how we should build, test and deploy software. You will drive the design of our continuous integration pipelines, testing infrastructure, training and support around our build system. Our current environment relies heavily on Python, Rust, and C++, which you will take ownership of and strive to transform into a state of the art development experience for research. Ultimately, your role will be to provide the necessary tools and metrics to support our fast-paced culture and ensure a stable, scalable platform for growth, while also fostering a seamless and low friction experience for OpenAI’s research. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. For a San Francisco role, 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: Have supported large monorepo development and deployment before Are a proficient Python programmer working in large monorepos Are proficient with Docker and Kubernetes Experienced in CI/CD 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 boun

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE: Are you the person on your team who builds the agent everyone else ends up using? We're looking for an AI Engineer to join our Training Product team and do that at Baseten. You'll build AI-driven product features for the customers training and post-training frontier models on our platform, and you'll raise the ceiling on how Baseten itself uses AI internally, turning manual workflows into agentic ones that make every other team faster. You'll work directly with our research engineers to scope and build products, taking ideas from a research loop that already works internally to something customers can run themselves. This is a hands-on role with real autonomy. You'll pick the problems worth solving, build the harnesses, execution flows, and guardrails that make AI systems reliable, and own the results. If you've been shipping agents and want that to be the job, let's talk. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES: Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our team: Baseten Training: an autoresearch substrate Introducing Baseten Loops Harnesses are everything. Here's how to optimize yours. Building with NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Ultra and LangChain Deep Agents Code on Baseten RESPONSIBILITIES: Build and ship agentic product experiences, including chat-style and assistant-like interfaces, from prototype to GA. Design the harnesses, execution flows, and guardrails that make AI systems reliable in production. Build internal autom

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE This role sits at the frontier of our research agenda. You will pursue open problems at the intersection of post-training methodology and performant inference, and then collaborate with research engineering to translate findings into production systems. A meaningful portion of your time will be dedicated to research that deepens our understanding of how models learn, alignment, and architectural efficiency — questions that may not have immediate product application. The remainder will be directed toward research that solves concrete problems for Baseten's platform and customers, who are the fastest growing AI companies in the world like Cursor, Lovable, and Notion. We are looking for someone with sharp research taste and genuine creative instinct for problem selection. Someone who can identify questions that matter, design clean experiments to answer them, and push the state of the art. The environment here is not theoretical, but rather research that can be validated with eager customers who are serving billions of tokens a second. RECENT RESEARCH Towards infinite context windows: neural KV cache compaction Dense, on-policy or both? Repeated kv cache for long-running agents Distillation without the dark – replicating black-box on-policy distillation on Baseten RESPONSIBILITIES Define and pursue a research agenda spanning both foundational and applied work, with the applied component connected to Baseten's pla

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE We’re looking for a customer-obsessed software engineer to come ship with us. You’ll own features like multi-node training and products like serverless reinforcement learning (RL) from conception to MVP (and from MVP to GA!). You’ll work through the stack, architecting solutions from API and UI down to our infrastructure layer. You’ll fine tune models yourself to develop an understanding of user workflows. You’ll work closely with research engineers leveraging state-of-the-art training techniques to build experiences that accelerate model development and solve for real pain points. If you’re excited to dive deep into the training, let’s talk! THE PRODUCT Take a look at what we’ve built so far: Overview of the product so far Training docs overview Story of the Training product Research we've done EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Checkpointing Pipeline: Our checkpointing pipeline starts with automated checkpointing, a feature that ensures that versions of models created during training are automatically backed up to the cloud. Users are able to then deploy checkpoints seamlessly into inference servers, providing point-and-click integrations into inference frameworks like vLLM and Baseten’s Inference Stack. This enables customers to quickly evaluate the performance of their checkpoints with real traffic. Multinode training: Multinode training enables customers to easily run training jobs across multiple compute nodes, enablin

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE As a Software Engineer at on the Training Infrastructure team, you'll architect and lead development of our training platform, supporting top tier research engineers and model developers. You'll make key technical decisions for the infrastructure enabling developers to deploy, scale, and monitor their workloads with high performance and reliability. You’ll own scheduling, storage, networking, reliability, and observability of technical systems in the training stack EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at what we’ve built so far: Overview of the product so far Training docs overview Story of the Training product Research we've done RESPONSIBILITIES Design and architect scalable infrastructure systems for our ML training platform (e.g. scheduling, storage, and networking) Partner closely with developers and research engineers to translate complex training requirements into technical solutions Design and architect a global training scheduler Design and architect reinforcement learning systems and continuous learning pipelines Drive long-term improvements to improve reliability of systems and velocity of development Partner closely with SRE and Capacity teams to unlock state of the art training infrastructure Make critical architectural decisions balancing performance with system reliability Lead technical discussions and mentor junior engineers on infrastructure best practices Contribute to long-term technical strateg

About the Team The Alignment team at OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that our AI systems are safe, trustworthy, and consistently aligned with human values, even as they scale in complexity and capability. Our work is at the cutting edge of AI research, focusing on developing methodologies that enable AI to robustly follow human intent across a wide range of scenarios, including those that are adversarial or high-stakes. We concentrate on the most pressing challenges, ensuring our work addresses areas where AI could have the most significant consequences. By focusing on risks that we can quantify and where our efforts can make a tangible difference, we aim to ensure that our models are ready for the complex, real-world environments in which they will be deployed. 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. About the Role As a Research Engineer / Research Scientist on the Alignment team, you will be at the forefront of ensuring that our AI systems consistently follow human intent, even in complex and unpredictable scenarios. Your role will involve designing and implementing scalable solutions that ensure the alignment of AI as their capabilities grow and that integrate human oversight into AI decision-making. This role is especially well suited for someone who can move from an ambiguous model-behavior question to a concrete experimental setup: formulate the hypothesis, build the evaluation or intervention, run the experiment, analyze the result, and decide what the evidence supports. This role may be based in San Francisco or London, subject to team needs and location approval. In this role, you will: We are seeking research engineers and res

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. ABOUT BASE LABS Base Labs is a research lab pushing the frontier of open-source LLMs. We think intelligence should be democratized, not controlled by a handful of closed labs and we think very few teams are actually positioned to do something about that. Backed by Baseten's training and inference infrastructure, we have the compute, resources, and talent to take on hard problems at the frontier and open-source what we learn along the way. Our mission is to help build a world where intelligence isn't concentrated, but spread across an ecosystem of models that anyone can build on. That mission shapes what we choose to work on, how we work on it, and who we want in the room. We are accepting applications on a rolling basis for our first cohort of Base Labs Fellows, which is expected to start in late September. Apply using this link. BASE LABS FELLOWSHIP OVERVIEW The Base Labs Fellowship is designed to give researchers exposure to what frontier research looks like in industry. We provide funding, mentorship, and full support to our fellows, with the goal of producing rigorous, published research that shapes both the open-source ecosystem and Baseten's technical roadmap. We run multiple cohorts of Fellows each year and review applications on a rolling basis. This application is for cohorts starting in Sept 2026 and beyond. WHAT TO EXPECT 3 months of full-time research from our San Francisco office A dedicated 1:1 mentorship

About the Team The Future of Computing Research team is an Applied Research team within the Consumer Devices group focused on developing new methods and models as we advance forward in our mission of building AGI that benefits all of humanity. As a Software Engineer on the Future of Computing Research team, you will work together with both the best ML researchers in the world and the greatest design talent of our generation to push the frontier of model capabilities. About the Role We are looking for a Software Engineer to join our team to build tools and services that enable AI research, evaluation, and data generation workflows. The best work in this role will start with an ambiguous design question and turn it into working research systems. You will work closely with researchers, designers, and engineers to build the evaluation systems, synthetic data generation pipelines, review tools, and supporting platform services. The goal is to make these workflows easier to create, run, and trust without requiring bespoke engineering support for each new design concept. You will help ensure that research artifacts have a clear lifecycle, runs are reproducible and observable, and results provide useful evidence for product and model-training decisions while the underlying systems remain reliable and reusable. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Build web applications, APIs, data models, and backend services for AI research workflows. Build tools to author and manage evaluation tasks, rubrics, graders, suites, and rollout configurations, including workflows for publishing, versioning, auditing, and sharing research artifacts. Automate evaluation runs and generate useful reports for design, research, and engineering teams. Support synthetic data generation workflows for multimodal and conversational research, including tools that comb

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. Achieving this requires bringing the world’s most exceptional talent under one roof to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Our Research Recruiting team plays a critical role in this effort. We are an embedded part of the research organization, working side by side with our research staff to deeply understand evolving priorities, build trust, and strategically shape the future of OpenAI’s talent. About the Role You will own and execute long-term talent strategies to identify, engage, and recruit many of the world’s leading and emerging AI researchers, research engineers, and technical scientists working at the frontier of machine learning. This is not a traditional execution-focused recruiting role. You will operate as a strategic partner to OpenAI’s research staff, helping define hiring priorities, shape search strategy, influence candidate evaluation, and guide hiring decisions that directly impact the direction and quality of our frontier-model research and fulfillment of our mission. In this role, you will: Partner directly with research and technical staff to define hiring priorities, shape search strategies, and anticipate future talent needs as technical roadmaps evolve. Proactively identify and cultivate exceptional AI/ML research talent across industry, academia, and emerging labs, often before formal hiring needs exist. Use market insights and candidate signals to influence hiring decisions, leveling, and compensation strategy for highly specialized research roles. Serve as a trusted advisor throughout candidate evaluation and closing — helping leaders calibrate for research excellence, long-term potential, and organizational fit. Collaborate closely with your sourcing partner to execute complex, high-impact searches in ambiguous or rapidly evolving technical domains. You might thrive in this role if you: Significant experience recruitin