Ai Research Scientist 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

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 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 Preparedness is a critical Safety Research team at OpenAI, which is focused on mitigating AI threats to global security that could scale to an extreme level of severity. Our work involves: Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems. Mitigation. Keeping misuse 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 As AI agents become more capable at software engineering, and automate more of our internal work, they could become a dangerous cyber threat. People in this role will help OpenAI prepare for security threats from advanced AI agent insiders. In this role, you will: Identify paths by which capable future internal AI agents could compromise OpenAI. Design security controls - focusing on measures with long lead times that benefit from advanced preparation. Stress-test defenses with AI agent evaluations and penetration tests You might thrive in this role if you: Are deeply technical across security and modern infrastructure, and are comfortable digging into the details of operating systems, cloud, containers, CI/CD, or distributed systems. Have strong software engineering skills and enjoy building prototypes yourself. Are interested in engaging with stakeholders and can do so effectively. Bonus: have experience securing cloud infrastructure, and are deeply familiar with core components of the AI stack. Compensation Range: $293K - $405K USD 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

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 ship AI products. THE ROLE Baseten's Compute org is in hyper growth. As it scales, the systems and workflows that keep supply and demand balanced across our GPU fleet need to get more sophisticated, and this role exists to make sure they do. Compute sits at the center of how Baseten allocates, forecasts, and manages the capacity that powers every customer inference request. The team that supports this work, C3, runs on a mix of internal tooling, manual processes, and systems that haven't fully kept pace with the scale of the problem. This role exists to close that gap. You'll design, build, and ship AI-powered workflows that give the Compute and C3 teams real leverage, automating the manual, repetitive, and error-prone parts of the capacity lifecycle so the team can focus on judgment calls that actually need a human. We want someone who can walk in, audit what exists today, identify what's missing or broken, and start shipping fast. You know when to reach for an existing internal tool and when to build something custom in Claude Code. You think two to three steps ahead about how the thing you build today fits into the broader capacity systems architecture tomorrow. And you bring a point of view on our stack, on what we should be building, and on where AI can do something existing tooling simply can't. RESPONSIBILITIES Ship AI-powered workflows for Compute and C3 : build the agents and automations that give capacity analysts, ops leads, an

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 As a Forward Deployed Engineer at Baseten, you will partner directly with customers to architect, build, and deploy high-scale production AI applications on Baseten’s platform. You’ll own the journey with customers from initial exploration to production deployment, translating ambiguous business goals into reliable, observable services with clear quality, latency, and cost outcomes. This role is a great fit for entrepreneurial engineers who want a front-row view into how modern companies adopt AI at scale and who enjoy working across product, software development, performance engineering, and customer-facing implementations. To be clear, this is an engineering role with hands-on coding and software development that also includes aspects of product management, technical customer success, and pre-sales solution engineering mixed in. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Take a look at these blog posts written by members of our Forward Deployed Engineering team: Forward Deployed Engineering on the frontier of AI The fastest, most accurate Whisper transcription Deploy production-ready model servers from Docker images Deploy custom ComfyUI workflows as APIs RESPONSIBILITIES Develop and maintain software systems and product features using one or more general-purpose programming languages in a production-level environment, with a preference for Python due to its relevance in ML projects. Drive customer impact by designing, implementin

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 are looking for an Account Executive to join our dynamic team. This role is a great fit for those with sales experience looking to grow within a high-growth startup environment. As an Account Executive, you will prospect and close new business alongside our founders and Marketing team. You’ll consult with our existing customer base and prospective customers to build meaningful relationships and shape our product and go-to-market roadmaps. RESPONSIBILITIES Help build the foundation and processes for customer-facing teams at Baseten Lead, negotiate, and execute new sales opportunities for Baseten In partnership with the marketing and BDR team, develop a strong sales pipeline to support quarterly and annual sales targets Establish and maintain relationships with key stakeholders within sales accounts Work cross-functionally to improve the customer experience and ensure sales effectiveness REQUIREMENTS 1-3 years of sales experience in a SaaS business Experience in selling to technical audiences Experience with developer/machine-learning tooling preferred, but not required Proven ability to close complex sales cycles Proficiency with sales and marketing automation tools Interest in working at an early-stage, fast-paced startup BENEFITS Competitive compensation, including meaningful equity. 100% coverage of medical, dental, and vision insurance for employee and dependents Flexible PTO policy including company wid

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 Baseten's engineers want to work in an AI-first way. What's missing isn't enthusiasm — it's the platform underneath it. Today everyone assembles their own agent config, context files, and MCP servers, so the good patterns stay trapped in individual setups instead of becoming defaults everyone inherits. You'll build that platform: the agent configurations tuned to our monorepo, the context and tooling layer that makes agents competent in our codebase, the evals that tell us which approaches actually work, and the rollout mechanics that get a new engineer productive with agents in week one. You are not here to mandate how engineers use AI — you're here to make the good path the easy path. Success looks like teams adopting what you build because it beats what they'd cobble together themselves, not because a policy requires it. Platform engineer, not AI evangelist. Ship infrastructure, measure it, kill what doesn't work, let adoption be the referee. The playbook for AI-first SDLC doesn't exist at any company yet. You'll write ours. WHAT YOU'LL BUILD Agent substrate — Repo-level context infrastructure that makes agents competent in our codebase ( CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md conventions, architecture and domain context, and the tooling to keep it accurate as code moves). Internal MCP servers giving agents scoped access to CI, observability, incident tooling, deployment state, and docs. Shared skills, subagents, and hooks th

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: Voice is becoming the internet’s next interface, but a production-grade Voice AI system is "hard to build" . You’ll join a small founding team of Baseten Voice AI, focused on bringing state-of-the-art open source models into production for Voice AI customers across productivity, customer service, clinical conversation, creator tools, education, and more. You’ll make a meaningful impact on people’s daily lives and help reshape these industries. This is a high-impact, high-ownership role. You will be the primary owner of Baseten Voice AI - our in-house inference stack to power Voice AI models - from product roadmap through engineering implementation. You’ll partner closely with Forward Deployed Engineers, Model Performance Engineers, and sister engineering teams to push the boundaries of Voice AI. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES: Develop world-class model serving stack for state-of-the-art open-source voice models - reduce end-to-end and tail latency (p95/p99), increase throughput, and improve GPU efficiency via profiling, runtime tuning, and server-level optimizations. Build large-scale, real-time infrastructure for multi-model voice agents - orchestrate STT, TTS, and agent components with streaming I/O to meet customer SLOs. Design tight training and inference iteration loops for voice model customization - enable fast evaluation, safe rollout, and rapid experimentation for custom voice model development. Past projects:

About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and advancing toward AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments. Working across the full model and systems stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the physical constraints of real-world systems to improve people’s lives. About the Role We are looking for a PCB Layout Engineer to design high-density electronics for next-generation robotic systems. You will own PCB layout from floor planning through fabrication release, working closely with electrical, SI/PI, mechanical, and manufacturing teams. This role is based in San Francisco and requires in-person presence four days per week. In this role, you will: Own PCB layout, component placement, routing, and fabrication release for complex robotic systems. Collaborate with SI/PI engineers to refine layouts based on simulation results. Implement high-speed routing, controlled impedance, power distribution, decoupling, grounding, EMI/EMC, thermal, and mechanical-integration requirements. Work directly with fabricators and assembly partners to define stack-ups, establish design rules, drive DFM/DFA/DFT reviews, and close findings before release. Prepare fabrication and assembly documentation, including drawings, ODB++, drill files, stack-up tables, and manufacturing notes. Inspect newly received PCBAs and participate in board-level manufacturing failure analysis. Contribute to reusable design constraints and layout workflows, and maintain component-library assets such as symbols, footprints, and 3D models. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 6+ years of experience designing complex, multilayer PCBs. Are fluent in Cadence Allegro PCB Designer and Constraint Manager. Have strong HDI design experience, including fine-pitch BGAs, microvias, blind and buried vias, via-in-pad, and sequential lamination.

About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives. About the Role We are seeking an Actuator Gear Design Engineer to lead the development of custom gears and gear stages for advanced robotic systems. You will own actuator development from early architecture and concept generation through prototype validation and system integration, partnering closely with mechanical, electrical, controls, firmware, and reliability teams. You will partner with external suppliers and internal manufacturing to create full gearbox assemblies. This role focuses on the design, integration, and validation of precision gearing, including broader knowledge around motor electromagnetics, transmission types, sensing, structural components, and thermal architectures. You will help drive actuator development across the full engineering lifecycle while establishing scalable design, test, and integration practices for future robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will: Lead the architecture, design, and integration of custom robotic actuator gearing. Define actuator requirements and system-level trade studies around torque density, bandwidth, efficiency, thermal performance, back drivability, inertia, reliability, manufacturability, and cost. Design precision electromechanical assemblies with strong attention to tolerances, alignment, load paths, thermal expansion, sealing, wear, and serviceability. Drive actuator integration into robotic systems, partnering closely with controls, firmware, electrical, and robotics software teams to optimize closed-lo

About The Team The Data Understanding team is responsible for creating the high quality datasets and their quantized representation for OpenAI. This includes synthesizing data, building VQ representations, and processing, filtering, deduplication, quality control, and tokenization so it can be used effectively in big model training runs. About The Role We're looking to advance how OpenAI builds and understands pretraining data at scale. You'll treat data quality and curation as core research problems: developing new methods to select, combine, and transform data; creating datasets that improve model capabilities; and designing rigorous experiments to understand how data choices and interventions affect model learning and downstream behavior. You'll work closely with frontier models and web-scale data to build evidence for which approaches work and why, then translate successful research into scalable data processing pipelines We Expect You To Have a strong track record of new or improved ML ideas, through publications, projects, or applied research. Own and drive a research agenda, from choosing the right problems to carrying long-running work through to impact. Be excited by OpenAI’s empirical, collaborative approach to research. Nice To Have Thoughtfulness about AI’s impact, including privacy, provenance, and data quality. Experience building high-performance deep learning or large-scale data processing 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 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

About The Team The Data Understanding team is responsible for creating the high quality datasets and their quantized representation for OpenAI. This includes synthesizing multimodal data, building VQ representations, and processing, filtering, deduplication, quality control, and tokenization so it can be used effectively in big model training runs. About The Role We’re looking to advance how OpenAI prepares, curates, synthesizes and understands multimodal data at scale. You’ll work on research and production problems like synthesizing multimodal content (images, audio, and video) and their supervisions, improving noisy data pipelines, building better quality filters, using models to automate data prep, and measuring whether changes in the dataset improve model performance. We Expect You To Have a strong track record of new or improved ML ideas, through publications, projects, or applied research. Own and drive a research agenda, from choosing the right multimodal data problems to carrying long-running work through to impact. Be excited by OpenAI’s empirical, collaborative approach to research. Nice To Have Experience with multimodal learning, audio, vision, video, synthetic data, or data-centric ML. Thoughtfulness about AI’s impact, including privacy, provenance, and data quality. Experience building high-performance deep learning or large-scale data processing 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 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

About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve people's lives. About the Role We are seeking a lead thermal simulation engineer to help accelerate the design and development of next-generation robotic systems through modeling, simulation, and analysis. You will work closely with mechanical, electrical, controls, and robotics engineers to evaluate designs before hardware is built, identify risks early, and guide critical architecture decisions. This role spans structural and thermal analysis and design across robotic subsystems including actuators, mechanisms, structures, electronics, and integrated systems. You will develop simulation workflows that improve engineering velocity, increase confidence in design decisions, and help us build more capable, reliable, and manufacturable robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. This role will be expected to be in office 4 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Perform thermal simulations to assess heat generation, cooling strategies, thermal interfaces, and system-level thermal performance Partner with mechanical, electrical, and controls engineers to influence design decisions early in development Build simulation models to evaluate robotic actuators, transmissions, mechanisms, structures, soft goods, and integrated assemblies Correlate simulation results with physical testing and develop methodologies to improve model accuracy Support architecture trade studies by evaluating design concepts before hardware is built Develop simulation workflows, standards, and best practices that scale across the robotics o