Overview: The Data Acquisition team within the Foundations organization at OpenAI is responsible for all aspects of data collection to support our model training operations. Our team manages web crawling and GPTBot services and works closely with Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling teams. We are looking for a skilled Software Engineer to join our Data Acquisition team. Responsibilities: Own and lead engineering projects in the area of data acquisition including web crawling, data ingestion, and search. Collaborate with other sub-teams, such as Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling, to ensure smooth data flow and system operability. Work closely with the legal team to handle any compliance or data privacy-related matters. Develop and deploy highly scalable distributed systems capable of handling petabytes of data. Architect and implement algorithms for data indexing and search capabilities. Build and maintain backend services for data storage, including work with key-value databases and synchronization. Deploy solutions in a Kubernetes Infrastructure-as-Code environment and perform routine system checks. Conduct and analyze experiments on data to provide insights into system performance. Qualifications: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field. 4+ years of industry experience in software development. Experience with large web crawlers a plus Strong expertise in large stateful distributed systems and data processing. Proficiency in Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code concepts. Willingness and enthusiasm for trying new approaches and technologies. Ability to handle multiple tasks and adapt to changing priorities. Strong communication skills, both written and verbal. 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
Jobs in United States
Ai Research Scientist in San Francisco
1,456 active opportunities · Updated October 2026
Showing
15 jobs
Explore current ai research scientist jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
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're looking for an experienced Electrical Engineer to help develop the next generation of robotic systems at OpenAI. This role spans the full lifecycle of hardware development, from early concept exploration and prototyping through circuit design, component selection, PCB layout, bring-up, integration, and deployment. Engineers in this role are expected to independently drive significant hardware efforts from initial concept through deployment. You will translate ambiguous goals into concrete engineering plans, make key technical decisions, coordinate closely with cross-functional partners, and own execution through the iterations required to deliver a successful system. Many of the systems we build are still being defined. You will work closely with mechanical, firmware, software, controls, and research teams to evaluate new ideas, develop novel hardware, and integrate it into robotic platforms. Success in this role requires strong engineering judgment, comfort operating in ambiguous spaces, and the ability to balance rapid experimentation with the discipline required to build reliable and scalable systems. The ideal candidate enjoys building things from first principles and is equally comfortable evaluating a new technology, debugging a prototype on the bench, reviewing PCB layout details, and driving system integration efforts. You should be able to move quickly when appropriate, but also know when investing in robustness, simplicity, or infrastructure will create leverage for future development. This role is
Overview: The Data Acquisition team within the Foundations organization at OpenAI is responsible for all aspects of data collection to support our model training operations. Our team manages web crawling and GPTBot services and works closely with Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling teams. We are looking for a skilled Full-Stack Engineer to join our Data Acquisition team to build and optimize the interfaces and tools that power our data infrastructure. Responsibilities: Develop and maintain full-stack applications that support data acquisition, including internal tools and dashboards. Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams, including Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling, to ensure seamless data ingestion and workflow management. Design and implement APIs to facilitate data interactions between internal services and external data sources. Enhance user experience by developing intuitive web-based interfaces for managing and monitoring data pipelines. Optimize backend services for performance, scalability, and security in a distributed computing environment. Work with legal and compliance teams to ensure our data acquisition processes adhere to privacy regulations and best practices. Deploy and maintain infrastructure using Kubernetes and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) methodologies. Analyze system performance, conduct experiments, and improve data workflows to maximize efficiency. Qualifications: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field. 4+ years of industry experience in full-stack development. Proficiency in frontend frameworks (React, Vue, or similar) and backend technologies such as Python, Node.js, or Go. Strong expertise in RESTful APIs, GraphQL, and database design (SQL and NoSQL). Experience building data-intensive applications that handle large-scale datasets. Familiarity with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker). Prior experience with web crawling and large-scale data processing is a
About the Team The Applied Engineering team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to consumers and businesses. You’ll join the team responsible for running the core infrastructure that supports products like ChatGPT and the API. The systems we support include our kubernetes clusters, infrastructure deployment, our networking stack, cloud abstractions, and more. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth. About the Role The cloud infrastructure team builds and maintains infrastructure abstractions allowing OpenAI to ship products quickly and scalably. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. In this role, you will: Design and build the development and production platforms that power our products, enabling reliability and security at scale Ensure our infrastructure can scale to the next order of magnitude Help create a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while enabling radical candor and the challenging of group think Like all other teams, we are responsible for the reliability of the systems we build. This includes an on-call rotation to respond to critical incidents as needed. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 5+ years building core infrastructure Have experience operating orchestration systems such as Kubernetes at scale Have experience building abstractions over cloud platforms Take pride in building and operating scalable, reliable, secure systems Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapid change This role is exclusively based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees. 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 depl
About the Team OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide. The Applied Foundations team owns the core product and platform layers that make those experiences possible — from identity & access, to safety to payments & commerce across all of our apps. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to deliver technology that is reliable, secure, and trusted at global scale. About the Role You will be a Senior Android engineer on OpenAI’s Applied Foundations team, building the core mobile experiences that power how users sign up, manage their account, family features, pay for services, stay safe, and interact with OpenAI’s products with confidence. This role is about creating high-quality products as well as reusable Android foundations that product teams across different OpenAI apps depend on to ship quickly while meeting the highest standards for security, reliability, and user trust. You’ll own complex client-side systems spanning UI, networking, local state, payment integrations and Apple platform integrations, and work closely with backend, product, and safety partners to shape the architecture that supports OpenAI’s mobile ecosystem at global scale. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 4+ years of professional software engineering experience. Have a proven track record of building high-quality Android applications in production. Are fluent in Kotlin (and/or Java) and familiar with Android development tools and architecture components. Prioritize performance, security, and user experience in mobile development. Enjoy working cross-functionally to bring ambitious product ideas to life. Care deeply about performance, security, and user experience. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We
About the Team OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products (such as ChatGPT & Codex) that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide. The Applied Foundations team owns the core product and platform layers that make those experiences possible — from identity & access, to safety to payments & commerce across all of our apps. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to deliver technology that is reliable, secure, and trusted at global scale. About the Role We’re hiring Backend Software Engineers to design and implement safe services and infrastructure that power our core products. What You’ll Do Architect, build, and improve scalable backend systems and APIs. Drive performance, reliability, and safety across distributed services. Implement data storage, retrieval, compute, and integration solutions. Participate in long-term architectural planning and technical design reviews. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience. You Might Thrive Here If You: Have strong experience with distributed systems, APIs, and backend languages (e.g., Go, Python, Rust, C++). Have experience setting up and maintaining production backend services and data pipelines. Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed. Enjoy building resilient services that handle large scale and complexity. Are self-directed and enjoy figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. 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
About the Team OpenAI’s Applications Engineering organization builds and operates the products (such as ChatGPT & Codex) that bring our cutting-edge research to millions of users and developers worldwide. The Applied Foundations team owns the core product and platform layers that make those experiences possible — from identity & access, to safety to payments & commerce across all of our apps. Our teams span product engineering, infrastructure, and safety, working together to deliver technology that is reliable, secure, and trusted at global scale. About the Role We’re hiring Full-Stack Software Engineers to design and implement safe services, systems and infrastructure that power our core products. In this role, you will: Architect, build, and improve frontend and backend systems. Work across the full stack to build products and systems from initial exploration through launch readiness. Participate in long-term architectural planning and technical design reviews. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to design solutions that protect against and mitigate adversarial attacks without compromising user experience. You might thrive in this role if you: Have built and shipped full-stack apps or systems end-to-end — in fast-moving, startup-like environments. Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed. Enjoy building resilient products and services that handle large scale and complexity. Are self-directed and enjoy figuring out the best way to solve a particular problem Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. 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 t
About the Team The Technology Vertical team builds within Core Products. The team’s mission is to transform every major function in a technology company with AI to drive higher economic output, while people remain owners of the outcomes: setting intent, applying judgment and craft, directing iteration, and owning the result. About the Role As a Product Manager on the Technology Vertical team, you will shape how knowledge workers use AI in their daily work. You’ll craft enterprise products at the intersection of novel research capabilities and genuine enterprise needs, driving the full feedback loop from research, to product, to OpenAI’s own enterprise functions, to the broader Technology Vertical. 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: Own the product roadmap for a line of business within tech verticals, using OpenAI’s organization to test, refine, and scale new workflows. Develop the ecosystem strategy across technology partners in your line of business You might thrive in this role if you: Have built enterprise products for non-developer knowledge workers and understand the needs of both individual contributors and organizational buyers. Can turn complex workflows, integrations, and permission requirements into clear product decisions. Are comfortable developing a strategy while working closely with engineers, customers, and cross-functional partners to ship and learn. Bring strong judgment about which vertical-specific needs should become reusable capabilities across a broader product. 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
About the Team We’re hiring Software Engineers to join our broader Infrastructure organization, which supports multiple high-impact teams. Depending on your interests and experience, you could work on one of several focus areas—including Core Distributed Systems, Reliability Engineering, Observability, Developer Productivity or Cloud Infrastructure. About the Role All teams are deeply collaborative, work on mission-critical services, and are responsible for building distributed, scalable infrastructure to bring OpenAI’s technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API. You’ll work closely with stakeholders to understand infrastructure, data and compute needs, setting the technical strategy that supports cutting-edge research and product development. This is a critical role for someone who is passionate about solving complex engineering problems at scale, ensuring their performance, scalability and reliability Team Focus Areas Distributed Systems: Owning and building important, highly scalable, available, performant, and reliable distributed systems (and their building blocks) to power the entire stack at OpenAI Systems Engineering: Work across layers of the stack—debugging system bottlenecks, evolving core infrastructure, and solving novel problems in performance and scalability. Reliability Engineering: Build scalable, fault-tolerant systems and lead efforts around service health, incident response, and resilience. Observability: Design and maintain observability tooling (metrics, logs, tracing) to give teams visibility into production systems at scale. Developer Productivity: Create tools, environments, and workflows that help engineers ship high-quality software faster and more safely. Cloud Infrastructure: Own the cloud-native infrastructure (compute, networking, storage) that underpins all services and research workloads. Databases: Building high performance, distributed database systems that power all of OpenAI's product stack. In this
About the Team The ChatGPT product team is a rapidly evolving, high-impact group within OpenAI that builds intuitive, safe, and useful AI-powered experiences for millions of people worldwide. Our team brings together engineering, design, research, and product to explore how conversational AI can help people learn, create, and solve problems. AI has the potential to transform how millions of people learn, teach, and achieve their goals. Learning is one of the top use cases on ChatGPT— not only for students, but also for adults building new skills in a rapidly changing world. The Education team is focused on advancing how humans learn with AI and working to make high-quality learning accessible. We aim to deliver measurable gains in cognition and achievement, partnering closely with students, educators, and country leaders to ensure new tools are safe, effective, and trusted. About the Role As a Product Manager for Education & Learning, you will shape the strategy and build products to advance learning experiences in ChatGPT— defining a category that could reshape classrooms, careers, and lifelong learning. You’ll collaborate with cross-functional partners—from AI research to design to go-to-market—to build ChatGPT into a true learning agent and ensure those products you build meet the needs of stakeholders throughout the ecosystem. You will also partner closely with product teams across growth, youth well-being, and enterprise to ensure alignment and maximize impact. 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: Define and drive the product vision for education and learning in ChatGPT. Partner with research teams to explore how AI can better advance learning outcomes Collaborate with cross-functional teams—including design, engineering, product, and go-to-market—to bring education features to life. Partner with xfn growth, GTM, and
About the Team Enterprise Verticals builds role-specific ChatGPT Work experiences for high-value enterprise workflows. We combine product engineering, plugins and skills, connectors, data, evaluations, and customer evidence to turn useful demos into reliable daily work. This opening sits within the Technology vertical inside Enterprise Verticals. The group focuses on repeatable workflows for people at technology companies, beginning with functions such as data and analytics, sales, and design, and carries the shared platform needs—tool integration, permissions, quality measurement, and safe rollout—across those experiences. We work closely with Design, Research, GTM, Security, and platform teams, as well as with customers and design partners. Success means that people can reach a trustworthy first result, understand what the system did, and keep using the workflow—not merely that a prototype exists. About the Role We are looking for a full-stack product engineer who can own ambiguous enterprise workflows end to end: understand a customer problem, shape the product, build across frontend and backend, work through platform dependencies, instrument quality, and learn quickly with design partners. You will build across ChatGPT Work surfaces, services, plugins, connectors, and data or permission boundaries when the experience requires it. You will make quality and rollout observable through evaluations, product and operational signals, and clear fallback or rollback paths. This is a product-engineering role for someone who can move between user problems and system details without losing ownership of either. The strongest candidates will be able to turn specific customer evidence into a generalizable product, explain scope and architecture tradeoffs, and carry a feature from an early prototype through a bounded production rollout. In this role, you will: Build and ship role-specific workflows across ChatGPT Work surfaces, services, plugins, and connectors. Turn customer a
About the Team ChatGPT is evolving from answering questions to becoming a deeply personalized assistant that helps people discover, create, and make decisions across everyday life. We're building new multimodal product experiences that combine language, images, personalization, and interactive interfaces to help millions of users accomplish tasks in entirely new ways. This team sits at the intersection of AI research, product engineering, design, and consumer experiences. We move quickly, ship frequently, and work on products that define how people interact with AI every day. About the Role We're looking for exceptional full stack product engineers who love building polished consumer experiences from the ground up. You'll work across frontend, backend, AI-powered workflows, and rich interactive interfaces to create new product experiences that blend conversation, visual understanding, personalization, and commerce. You'll collaborate closely with designers, researchers, product managers, and model teams to rapidly prototype, launch, and iterate on experiences used by millions of people. This is an opportunity to help invent entirely new interaction paradigms—not just build traditional web applications. In This Role, You Will Design and build end-to-end product experiences across web services, APIs, and modern frontend applications. Partner closely with product, design, and research to rapidly prototype and launch new AI-native experiences. Build intuitive, performant interfaces that make advanced AI capabilities feel simple and delightful. Develop scalable backend systems that power personalized, real-time product experiences. Work with multimodal capabilities including text, images, and interactive UI components. Iterate quickly using user feedback, experimentation, and product metrics. Help define engineering standards, architecture, and technical direction for a fast-growing product area. You Might Thrive If You Have significant experience building consumer-facin
About the Team: The Database Systems team specializes in high-performance distributed databases. Our team built Rockset, the real-time search, analytics, and vector database that powers all vector search and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at OpenAI. In addition to retrieval, as an online database, Rockset powers core functionality across all of OpenAI's product lines and many critical internal use cases. About the Role : We are looking for engineers passionate about distributed systems, close-to-the-metal performance optimization (our core engine is written in C++), and building scalable database infrastructure from the ground up. As an engineer on the Database Systems team, you'll contribute to the core database engine, driving improvements across ingestion, query execution, indexing, and storage. You'll partner with teams across OpenAI to unlock new product capabilities and help scale online database reliability and throughput as usage grows by orders of magnitude. In this role you will: Design, build, and operate high-performance distributed systems Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks to scale infrastructure to the next order of magnitude Define long-term technical direction and guide system evolution Collaborate with product, engineering, and research teams to deliver scalable and reliable infrastructure Dig deep into complex production issues across the stack Contribute to incident response, postmortems, and best practices for system reliability You might thrive in this role if you: Have significant experience building, scaling, and optimizing distributed systems at scale Are curious about database internals, storage engines, or low-latency query systems Enjoy debugging challenging performance issues in complex, high-throughput systems Have experience operating production clusters at scale (e.g., Kubernetes or other orchestration systems) Think rigorously about scalability, correctness, and reliability Thrive in fast-paced environments with high
About the Team The ChatGPT Learning team focuses on building the next generation of learning experiences inside ChatGPT. Learning is already one of the largest consumer use cases on the platform, with millions of people each week using ChatGPT to understand concepts, practice skills, and get unstuck while learning. Our goal is to evolve ChatGPT from a place people go for one-off answers into a platform that helps people learn, grow, and make progress over time. We are exploring how AI can expand access to powerful learning tools for people everywhere—helping individuals better understand the world, build new skills, and pursue their goals. This team sits at the intersection of product engineering, design, AI research, and education, working to bring powerful learning experiences to a global audience. About the Role As a Full Stack Engineer on the ChatGPT Learning team, you will help design and build new product experiences that enable millions of people to learn with ChatGPT. You’ll work across the stack—from user-facing interfaces to backend services—to ship product features that make learning more intuitive, engaging, and effective. You’ll collaborate closely with researchers and platform teams to bring cutting-edge model capabilities into real-world products, helping translate advances in AI into experiences that people can use every day. We’re looking for engineers who enjoy building polished product experiences, operating with high ownership, and solving ambiguous problems that sit at the intersection of AI research and consumer software. This role is based in San Francisco or New York City. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. What You’ll Do Build end-to-end product experiences that help people learn with ChatGPT. Design and implement new multimodal capabilities that bring text, images, voice, and interactive interfaces into learning workflows. Develop scalable backend services and APIs t
About the Team At OpenAI, we’re building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence. We deploy our models through ChatGPT, our APIs, and other cutting-edge products. Behind the scenes, making these systems fast, reliable, and cost-efficient requires world-class infrastructure. The Caching Infrastructure team is responsible for building a caching layer that powers many critical use cases at OpenAI. We aim to provide a high-availability, multi-tenant cache platform that scales automatically with workload, minimizes tail latency, and supports a diverse range of use cases. We’re looking for an experienced engineer to help design and scale this critical infrastructure. The ideal candidate has deep experience in distributed caching systems (e.g., Redis, Memcached), networking fundamentals, and Kubernetes-based service orchestration. In This Role, You Will: Design, build, and operate OpenAI’s multi-tenant caching platform used across inference, identity, quota, and product experiences. Define the long-term vision and roadmap for caching as a core infra capability, balancing performance, durability, and cost. Collaborate with other infra teams (e.g., networking, observability, databases) and product teams to ensure our caching platform meets their needs. You Might Thrive In This Role If You: Have 5+ years of experience building and scaling distributed systems, with a strong focus on caching, load balancing, or storage systems. Have deep expertise with Redis, Memcached, or similar solutions, including clustering, durability configurations, client-side connection patterns, and performance tuning. Have production experience with Kubernetes, service meshes (e.g., Envoy), and autoscaling systems. Think rigorously about latency, reliability, throughput, and cost in designing platform capabilities. Thrive in a fast-paced environment and enjoy balancing pragmatic engineering with long-term technical excellence. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company d
Other cities to consider
More places hiring for this role
Get new ai research scientist jobs in San Francisco, United States by email
Daily job updates · Unsubscribe anytime