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Ai Research Scientist in San Francisco

1,456 active opportunities · Updated October 2026

Explore current ai research scientist jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.

O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team The Employee Technology & Experience (ETX) team is responsible for delivering a world-class internal technology experience that enables employees to do their best work. We support and operate the employee-facing systems that keep the company moving quickly and efficiently. ETX spans support, logistics, AV, identity, endpoints, SaaS administration, automation, enterprise tooling, and internal infrastructure operations. We partner closely with Security, Engineering, Workplace, Finance, People, and other teams to keep OpenAI’s internal technology reliable, scalable, and moving at the pace of the company. About the Role We are hiring a Program Manager to help scale how IT operates across OpenAI. This role will lead complex cross-functional programs that improve operational maturity, streamline how teams work together, and turn high-impact initiatives into durable operational capabilities. You will work across IT, Security, Engineering, Workplace, and other functions to drive alignment, remove friction, and help build the operational foundation needed to support OpenAI’s rapid growth. You’ll be responsible for: Lead cross-functional operational programs that improve scalability, consistency, and operational maturity. Drive operational excellence initiatives across IT Support, employee lifecycle operations, meeting room and calendaring services, onsite support, vending, and research support environments. Build operating models, readiness plans, escalation paths, governance cadences, and success metrics for complex operational programs. Partner with technical teams to ensure new deployments, infrastructure investments, and internal platforms are operationally ready and sustainably supported at scale. Drive high-priority operational programs supporting company growth, including infrastructure expansion, operational integrations, and other emerging initiatives. Improve operational visibility, stakeholder alignment, and coordination across long-running cros

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to ensure the responsible and widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. In support of that mission, the Marketing team helps deeply understand customer audiences and market dynamics, influence the development of the right products, build sustainable and customer-aligned monetization models, and drive awareness, adoption, and usage across OpenAI’s products and platform. We take a data-driven approach to understand markets, develop monetization strategies, and uncover customer needs that shape product strategy and messaging. We partner closely with Sales, Partnerships, Product, Engineering, Research, Comms, and Design to deliver a cohesive end-to-end customer experience and lead go-to-market efforts for new product launches across channels. About the Role We are hiring a Head of Enterprise Ads Marketing to define and scale OpenAI’s global marketing strategy for enterprise advertisers, agencies, and strategic brand partners. This leader will own how advertisers understand, evaluate, adopt, and grow with OpenAI’s advertising solutions. This is a highly strategic and hands-on leadership role where you will shape the narratives that position OpenAI as a premium advertising platform for the world’s marketers while building the content, thought leadership, events, and demand programs that drive pipeline and long-term strategic growth. You will partner closely with Sales, Partnerships, Product, Finance, Legal, Communications, Research, and Data Science to help establish OpenAI as a trusted leader in the future of AI-powered advertising. This role is ideally based in San Francisco, CA, with a hybrid schedule of three days per week in the office. In This Role, You Will: Define the end-to-end enterprise advertiser marketing strategy across awareness, consideration, pipeline creation, adoption, expansion, and long-term growth. Develop OpenAI’s enterprise advertising narratives, positioning, and messaging architecture across AI-powered mar

AWSGitRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team Frontier Systems Foundations, part of Compute Foundations at OpenAI, builds the systems software foundation that turns new compute infrastructure into reliable, usable capacity for frontier model training. Our mission is to make some of the world's largest GPU clusters work reliably for frontier training. We bring new platforms and clusters online, safely maintain installed fleets, and partner with hardware, infrastructure, and research teams to resolve the system-level issues that keep jobs from running. That means building and maintaining the software closest to the machine: Linux and Ubuntu operating-system images, kernels and modules, drivers, packages and repositories, disks and boot configuration, firmware integration, provisioning, and system-level validation. We make these components reproducible, compatible, and safe to operate across heterogeneous fleets. About the Role We are looking for systems software engineers with deep Linux and host-systems experience to build, qualify, and maintain the operating-system foundation for OpenAI's frontier compute fleet. Relevant backgrounds include kernel and module development, Linux distribution or image engineering, package management, firmware and driver integration, disks and boot, and bare-metal provisioning. You'll work closely with hardware engineers, vendors, and infrastructure teams to bring up new platforms, integrate system components, and debug failures across firmware, disks, boot, operating systems, kernels, drivers, and workload interactions. Your work will directly influence how quickly new capacity becomes usable and how reliably large GPU fleets operate. You should be comfortable writing and maintaining production-quality systems software and automation, but we do not expect expertise across every layer. This is an opportunity to go deep on challenging systems problems while building the image, package, qualification, and recovery paths that power the next generation of frontier models

AWSLinuxRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

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 safety 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, and have thought deeply about technical paths to safe AGI. Bring experience in the field of AI safety, 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 languages. Are deeply curious. About OpenA

PythonAWSRestMachine Learning
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team The Privacy Engineering team builds the systems and technical foundations that govern how user data is understood, retained, accessed, and used across OpenAI. We partner with Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal to translate policy and trust commitments into durable architecture and enforceable controls. Our work spans data inventory and mapping, classification and lineage, retention and deletion, access governance, purpose and usage controls, auditability, and lifecycle automation. We aim to make policy-aligned data handling the default while giving teams clear, reliable primitives for building and operating products at scale. About the Role We are looking for an experienced Software Engineer to drive the architecture and execution of user data governance across OpenAI. You will define technical direction, build shared platforms and controls, and lead cross-functional programs that make data flows discoverable, policies enforceable, and ownership explicit. This role is well suited to a senior engineer who can move between deep systems design and organization-wide influence, turn ambiguous requirements into pragmatic roadmaps, and operate high-trust systems end to end. This position is based in San Francisco. Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Set the technical strategy and architecture for user data governance across data mapping, classification, lineage, retention, deletion, access, and permitted usage. Design and build shared services, APIs, metadata systems, and policy-enforcement mechanisms that make governance controls consistent, scalable, and auditable. Establish reliable inventories of user data, system ownership, data flows, and policy applicability across products, infrastructure, analytics, and research systems. Partner with Product, Data, Infrastructure, Security, and Legal leaders to define decision rights, translate requirements into controls, and drive adoption across teams. Own governance systems

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team The Support Automation team at OpenAI scales the organization by applying cutting-edge AI models to real-world challenges, automating and enhancing work across the organization. From customer operations to engineering, we develop an ecosystem of automation products that empower our colleagues and drive impact. We're passionate about crafting products that serve those around us, blending rapid prototyping with a focus on long-term quality and reliability. By creating reusable solutions, we create patterns that can be applied across diverse domains within OpenAI. TLDR: this team leverages OpenAI technology to improve OpenAI, and you’ll have the opportunity to leverage the full extent of our tech (both public and pre-released) to accomplish this mission. About the Role We’re looking for a Backend Software Engineer with experience working in ML/LLM-heavy domains to help to design and build an evals infrastructure that measures the quality of OpenAI’s support automation. This is a deeply technical and highly cross-functional role where you’ll build robust systems and backend services that serve as the foundation for how knowledge is created, accessed, and applied across OpenAI. The role will especially focus on working closely with Data Science and Research partners to design and build evals at scale. In this role, you will: Design eval pipelines that are reliable, reproducible, and extendable Build the infrastructure for continuous eval monitoring frameworks (regression/drift monitoring, building robust golden datasets) along with feedback loops that ultimately strengthen support automation Design, build, and maintain backend services and APIs to support intelligent automation and knowledge systems Integrate and structure data across internal platforms, transforming it into formats optimized for use by downstream systems and AI workflows. Collaborate closely with data, research, and engineering teams to integrate OpenAI models into high-leverage workflows

PythonAWSRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About OpenAI OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. Our mission requires building not only world-class AI models, but also the infrastructure that enables those models to be deployed reliably, efficiently, and at global scale. As demand for AI continues to grow, we are expanding the ways OpenAI can bring high-performance inference capacity online across a diverse hardware ecosystem. About the Team The GPT Infrastructure team builds software that turns advanced inference and optimization research into production products. One focus is enabling strategic infrastructure partners and accelerator vendors to qualify and onboard new compute without a bespoke porting and optimization effort for every hardware platform. We build the control planes, APIs, secure partner-side execution environments, evaluation systems, artifact pipelines, and operational tooling that make these workflows repeatable and trustworthy. The work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, AI inference, compilers and runtimes, performance engineering, security, and external partnerships. About the Role We are seeking an experienced systems generalist who can work comfortably across the stack to help build an automated inference optimization platform. Given a workload, target hardware profile, compiler and runtime context, and a trusted verifier, the system runs durable optimization campaigns that generate, compile, execute, grade, and improve candidate kernels, runtime configurations, and serving-stack changes. You will design both the OpenAI-hosted control plane and the partner-side software that evaluates candidates on real accelerator hardware. The product must keep long-running workflows reliable, make performance results reproducible, and maintain clear trust boundaries around sensitive model and hardware information. This is a deeply cross-stack role, combining strong software engineering fundamentals with systems thinking and

PythonAWSLinuxRest
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team Security is at the foundation of OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security team protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products. We are technical in what we build but are operational in how we do our work, and are committed to supporting all products and research at OpenAI. Our Security team tenets include: prioritizing for impact, enabling researchers, preparing for future transformative technologies, and engaging a robust security culture. About the Role As a Security Engineer on Detection & Response, you’ll help protect OpenAI’s most sensitive assets– including our intellectual property, customer data, and the infrastructure that supports them– by building and operating the systems we use to detect suspicious activity and respond effectively when it matters. You’ll work across endpoints, identity, cloud, hyperscale compute infrastructure, and datacenter-adjacent layers, partnering closely with security teams and infrastructure owners to define the telemetry and response requirements we need and building tooling and automation where it delivers the most leverage. In this role, you will: Build and evolve Detection & Response capabilities across OpenAI’s infrastructure, products, and research environments, with an emphasis on high-signal detection and reliable operational response. Engineer detection pipelines and tooling: develop rule lifecycle management, measurement/quality loops (coverage, precision, latency), tuning processes, and safe rollout patterns. Automate response and investigations by building workflows that reduce toil (triage, enrichment, containment, evidence capture) and improve time-to-understand/time-to-contain. Partner with other Security teams and system/infrastructure owners across the company to ensure new systems ship with the right telemetry, threat models, and response playbooks from day one. Define D&R requirements and drive visibility across endpoin

AWSAzureGCPKubernetes
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team Tax and Trade at OpenAI shapes business strategy by embedding critical tax, export control, customs, and cross-border considerations into how the company builds, sources, scales, and operates in support of the mission. We combine deep expertise with practical systems thinking to look around corners, identify emerging risks and opportunities early, and help teams make smarter decisions at the point where strategy becomes execution. Across procurement, hardware operations, manufacturing, logistics, finance, legal, supplier onboarding, and operator workflows, we build robust, scalable support services leveraging cutting-edge technology—including governed AI and automation—to make complex regulated work more durable, more efficient, and easier to scale. About the Role We’re hiring a Senior Manager, Export Controls to lead OpenAI’s export controls strategy and operating model. This is a senior role with broad scope across advanced computing, semiconductors, software, hardware, manufacturing, and high technology partnerships. You will refine how OpenAI classifies controlled technology, software, and hardware, structures access-controlled environments, manages licensing and supplier commitments, and scales export-control operations in a way that supports the company’s pace of innovation. You will also shape how OpenAI applies AI and agentic workflows to policy-heavy operational work, building systems that make complex rules easier to navigate and easier to execute. In this role, you will: Refine the strategy and operating model for OpenAI’s export controls program across advanced computing, semiconductors, software, hardware, manufacturing, and high technology partnerships. Own export classification and licensing strategy for controlled technical data, software, hardware, and research environments. Lead the design and operation of compliant controlled environments and related governance processes. Partner with Research and Infrastructure to support efficient

AWSRestAIGo
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Role We are seeking a Cloud Infrastructure Engineer to help design and evolve the platforms that power OpenAI’s products. In this role, you will be a hands-on technical leader, driving the architecture, scalability, reliability, and security of critical infrastructure systems. You will help define how we build and operate infrastructure at the next order of magnitude, while influencing technical direction across teams. This role is both deeply technical and highly strategic, requiring strong ownership, sound judgment, and the ability to partner effectively across engineering, product, and research organizations. In this role, you will: Design and build scalable, reliable, and secure infrastructure platforms that power OpenAI products Evolve cloud infrastructure abstractions that enable rapid product development across teams Architect systems to support significant growth, performance, and operational complexity Improve server orchestration, networking, distributed systems reliability, and infrastructure security posture Influence technical direction and infrastructure strategy across multiple teams Partner closely with product, research, and engineering teams to align infrastructure with evolving needs Own operational excellence, including participation in on-call rotations, incident response, and production readiness Mentor engineers and raise the overall technical bar of the organization Contribute to a culture of high ownership, low ego, and thoughtful collaboration You might thrive in this role if you: 8+ years of experience building and operating large-scale infrastructure systems Deep expertise in Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale Strong experience designing cloud abstractions and platform infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure, or similar) Proven track record of leading complex technical initiatives across teams Experience operating highly reliable, secure, and scalable distributed systems Security engineering experience or security backgroun

AWSAzureGCPKubernetes
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team The Platform Analytics team builds the systems OpenAI researchers use to understand the quality and behavior of the models we train including what models are doing, why they behave in a particular way, and how that behavior changes across experiments. Neptune is a core part of this work. It ingests, stores, queries, and visualizes large volumes of metrics from pretraining, post-training, and reinforcement learning. Hundreds of researchers depend on these systems in their daily work to compare experiments, debug unexpected behavior, and decide what to try next. Our scope is broader than metrics. We also build platforms that help researchers analyze samples, traces, evaluation results, and other structured or unstructured data through dashboards, APIs, and increasingly agent-driven workflows. These systems need to remain fast, reliable, and understandable as the scale and complexity of research change quickly. We are not trying to become a consulting team that builds a separate solution for every research project. We work directly with researchers to understand recurring problems, then turn them into reusable infrastructure and platform capabilities that many teams can build on. About the Role We’re looking for a hands-on experienced software engineer who can take ownership of a critical system and drive it from problem definition through production adoption. This person should be able to own a platform such as CacheHouse end to end: define its technical direction, design its data model and storage architecture, integrate it with several research dashboards and workflows, guide one or two engineers, and ensure the system works reliably for its users. The right candidate should already bring the technical judgment, ownership, and execution expected at this level. The primary learning curve should be OpenAI’s stack and research problem space, not learning how to lead a complex engineering effort or deliver a production system. You will work directly with

AWSRestAIC++
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team: Compute Infrastructure builds the platform that turns enormous amounts of compute into a reliable engine for frontier AI. We design, provision, schedule, operate, and optimize the systems that connect accelerators, CPUs, networks, storage, data centers, orchestration software, agent infrastructure, developer tools, and observability into one coherent experience for researchers and product teams. Our work spans the entire stack: capacity planning and cluster lifecycle, bare-metal automation, distributed systems, Kubernetes and scheduling, deep system optimization, high-performance networking, storage, fleet health, reliability, workload profiling, benchmarking, and the developer experience that lets teams use enormous compute systems with confidence. At this scale, small improvements to communication, scheduling, hardware efficiency, or debugging workflows can compound into meaningful research velocity. We are hiring across Compute Infrastructure rather than for a single narrow team, and we use this opening to match strong engineers to the problems where they can have the most leverage. About the Role We are looking for engineers who want to build the compute platform behind OpenAI's research and products. You may not be the strongest in low-level systems, high-performance computing, distributed infrastructure, reliability, CaaS, agent infrastructure, developer platforms, tooling, or the user experience around infrastructure. What matters is that you can reason carefully about complex systems, write durable software, and raise the quality and velocity of the people around you. Depending on your background and interests, you might work close to hardware, close to users, on CaaS and agent infrastructure, or on the control planes and data planes in between. You could help bring new supercomputing capacity online, optimize training workloads from profiler traces and benchmarks, improve NCCL and collective communication behavior, reason about GPUs, NICs, t

AWSKubernetesRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team Security is foundational to OpenAI’s mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Security organization protects OpenAI’s technology, people, and products by building and operating deeply technical systems that must work reliably at massive scale. Our work underpins OpenAI’s commitments around safety, privacy, and security across research, products, and emerging platforms. The Host Assurance team exists to make bare metal a dependable, scalable foundation for OpenAI: secure by default, verifiable in practice, and resilient across providers and operating models. We operate at the trust boundary between physical hardware and cloud-scale orchestration, ensuring that hosts are eligible to safely run workloads with predictable security properties and auditability. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a Security Engineer, Host Assurance to help build the trust foundations for bare-metal platforms across OpenAI’s global infrastructure. This is a deeply hands-on engineering role for a builder who can design, implement, and operate the core security infrastructure that establishes trust in hardware platforms before they are eligible to run workloads. Success in this role requires strong technical judgment, the ability to work comfortably at low levels of the stack, and a practical mindset for building systems that are secure, reliable, and usable in fast-moving production environments. The systems you build will sit on the critical path of OpenAI’s frontier infrastructure investments and will directly shape how large amounts of compute are brought online - securely, responsibly, and at global scale - underpinning long-lived commitments around privacy, security, and reliability. You will partner closely with infrastructure, research, and confidential computing initiatives—including novel hardware platforms and emerging deployment models– to make the secure path the easiest path. This role is well suited for engineers who enjo

AWSRestAgileAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -82%

About the Team The Strategic Finance team provides financial insights and guidance to support OpenAI’s long-term goals and strategies. We partner across the business to allocate and deploy our resources for the highest-impact outcomes.  Within Strategic Finance, the B2B team focuses on the financial performance of our products and GTM functions, ensuring tight alignment between financial objectives and company strategy. We partner with leaders across Product, GTM, Research, Partnerships, and Operations to: Drive operational planning, financial forecasting, and performance management. Provide decision-quality insights on product and financial performance to inform strategic resource allocation. Build the “0→1” financial foundations required to scale and accelerate growth. About the Role We are hiring a senior leader in B2B Strategic Finance to build and scale a new pillar within our finance organization. This is a highly visible role that reports into the Head of B2B Strategic Finance and supports some of our most critical executive stakeholders, including our COO, CFO, and CRO, among others on the B2B Leadership Team. This role is ideally based in our San Francisco HQ, but we are open to NYC and Seattle. 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: Drive B2B finance scale and rigor Build and scale core financial infrastructure across the B2B business, including forecasting methodology, variance management, and performance narratives that drive accountability and decision-making velocity. Lead consolidated planning across revenue, gross margin (including compute), and opex for annual budget, forecasts, regular business reviews, and long-range planning. Establish durable management reporting: KPI definitions, dashboards, month-end/quarter-end deliverables, and exec-ready readouts. Partner with Corporate FP&A, Accounting, and Finance Systems/Data to evolve processes and contro

SQLAWSRestAI
O
📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -82%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

About the Team The Intelligence & Investigations Engineering team builds systems that detect, analyze, and disrupt abuse across OpenAI’s products. We partner closely with the Child Safety team and cross-functional groups to protect users while advancing OpenAI’s goal of developing AI that benefits everyone. About the Role As a Fullstack Engineer focused on child safety, you’ll build data-intensive, AI-powered applications and infrastructure that enable operators and investigators to work effectively and responsibly. You’ll adapt quickly in ambiguous, fast-moving environments to deliver well-crafted, reliable tooling for high-severity safety work. *Candidates should understand this role involves exposure to sensitive and egregious content. In this role, you will: 4+ years of experience as a software engineer Prototype, build, and maintain intelligence systems that detect, triage, and enable efficient human review of possible high severity harm Work hand in hand with operators and investigators, designing and delivering systems that enable them to do their work faster, more accurately, and more safely. Develop across the stack: UIs, services, pipelines, and anything else required to solve the problems we face. Interact with partners across Product Policy, Platform Integrity, Safety Systems, and Research Contribute to the team’s technical strategy, especially for child safety related tools and systems Report on impact in a data-driven fashion You might thrive in this role if you: Have a strong software engineering foundation and enjoy owning systems end-to-end—from infrastructure and data ingestion to frontend tooling Are energized by working at the frontier of AI capabilities, integrating new models and APIs into practical systems Have experience building and operating large-scale data pipelines or search/retrieval systems Are proficient in Python and/or TypeScript, and familiar with tools like Spark, Kafka, Flink, data warehouses, and SQL Take a product-minded ap

TypeScriptPythonSQLArtificial Intelligence
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