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Inference Engineering And Product Lead in San Francisco

268 active opportunities · Updated October 2026

Explore current inference engineering and product lead jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team Our team analyzes inference stack performance across the application, model, and fleet layers to identify bottlenecks and drive faster, cheaper inference. We combine systems profiling, benchmarking, and analysis to understand where time and cost are spent, then turn that understanding into performance optimizations and models that project performance and capacity needs for future launches. About the Role In this role, you will model inference performance across application, model, and fleet layers with higher fidelity. You will build cost-to-serve estimates from microbenchmarks and create tools that help cross-functional teams reason about latency, capacity, utilization, and cost tradeoffs. In this role, you will Build and refine performance models that translate microbenchmark results into cost-to-serve estimates. Analyze inference workloads end to end across applications, models, and fleet infrastructure. Enhance tooling to identify bottlenecks across layers for latency and throughput. Partner with other teams to turn performance insights into concrete improvements and project how future changes affect inference. You might thrive in this role if you: Enjoy reasoning from first principles about distributed systems, model inference, and hardware efficiency. Are comfortable working across abstraction layers, from application behavior to kernels, accelerators, networking, and fleet scheduling. Have deep expertise with performance profiling, benchmarking, analysis, and optimization. Enjoy collaborating with engineering and research teams to improve real production 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 o

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time· Remote
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -79.1%
Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

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 As a member of the Capacity Strategy & Operations team, you will sit at the intersection of supply intelligence, demand forecasting, and cross-functional execution, turning a complex, fast-moving hardware market into a predictable, reliable foundation for our customers and internal engineering teams. This is not a purely analytical role. You will own the end-to-end capacity planning process: from translating customer commitments and growth forecasts into concrete supply requirements, to coordinating fulfillment across vendors, finance, and the infrastructure team, to building the systems that make all of this repeatable and scalable. When supply is constrained and tradeoffs are unavoidable, you are the person in the room who can model the options, make a clear recommendation, and drive alignment fast. You are a strong fit if you have operated at the intersection of strategy and execution before — someone who is equally comfortable building a capacity model in a spreadsheet and running a cross-functional war room when a customer deployment is at risk. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES Demand-Supply Alignment Framework: Build and own the process that translates customer pipeline, signed commitments, and growth projections into a forward-looking GPU demand signal — so the team is never caught flat-footed when a customer scales faster than expected. Constrained Allocation Playbook: Define the decision framework for how Basete

Machine LearningAIGoExcel
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -79.1%

ABOUT BASETEN Baseten powers mission-critical inference for the world's most dynamic AI companies, like Cursor, Notion, OpenEvidence, Abridge, Clay, Gamma and Writer. By uniting applied AI research, flexible infrastructure, and seamless developer tooling, we enable companies operating at the frontier of AI to bring cutting-edge models into production. We're growing quickly and recently raised our $1.5B Series F , led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction Partners, and Spark Capital. Join us and help build the platform engineers turn to to ship AI products. THE ROLE We’re seeking a GPU Kernel Engineer to join our team at the cutting edge of AI acceleration, where your code directly impacts the performance of state-of-the-art machine learning models. As a GPU Kernel Engineer, you'll craft the foundation that powers modern AI workloads, optimizing every microsecond of computation to enable breakthrough applications. You'll work in a fast-paced, intellectually stimulating environment where technical excellence is paramount and your contributions directly influence production systems serving millions of users across numerous products. This role offers exceptional growth potential for engineers passionate about low-level optimization and high-impact systems work. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES You'll get to work on these types of projects as part of our Model Performance team: Baseten Embeddings Inference: The fastest embeddings solution available The Baseten Inference Stack Driving model performance optimization RESPONSIBILITIES Core Engineering Responsibilities Design and implement high-performance GPU kernels for key ML operations, including matrix multiplications, attention mechanisms, and mixture-of-experts routing Write and optimize code using CUDA, PTX assembly, and architecture-specific techniques Apply advanced performance optimization methods such as memory coalescing, warp-level programming, tensor core acceleration, and compute/memory overlap Performance & Innovation Impl

AWSMachine LearningAIC++
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -79.1%

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 passionate about advancing the application of artificial intelligence? We are looking for a Software Engineer focused on ML performance to join our dynamic team. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in a fast-paced startup environment and is eager to make significant contributions to the exciting field of LLM Inference. If you are a backend engineer who thrives on making things faster and is excited about open-source ML models, we look forward to your application. EXAMPLE INITIATIVES You'll get to work on these types of projects as part of our Model Performance team: Baseten Embeddings Inference: The fastest embeddings solution available The Baseten Inference Stack Driving model performance optimization RESPONSIBILITIES Implement, refine, and productionize cutting-edge techniques (quantization, speculative decoding, kv cache reuse, chunked prefill and LoRA) for ML model inference and infrastructure. Deep dive into underlying codebases of TensorRT, PyTorch, TensorRT-LLM, vllm, sglang, CUDA, and other libraries to debug ML performance issues. Apply and scale optimization techniques across a wide range of ML models, particularly large language models. Collaborate with a diverse team to design and implement innovative solutions. Own projects from idea to production. REQUIREMENTS Bachelor's, Master's, or Ph.D. degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or related field. Experience with one

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -79.1%

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 OPPORTUNITY We are looking for Senior Software Engineers to join our team. This is a specialized, high-impact role sitting at the intersection of high-performance computing (HPC) and Large Language Model (LLM) engineering. You will not just be building the automated "speedometer and diagnostic" suite for our next-generation AI infrastructure; you will be defining the roadmap, driving key technical decisions, and taking full ownership of the future of this work. RESPONSIBILITIES Benchmarking : Evaluate, run and automate standard LLM quality benchmarks (GSM8K, MMLU) alongside custom performance suites for specific workloads (e.g., long-context window, KV cache reuse, disaggregated serving). DevEx Improvement : Develop and maintain internal GPU-enabled development environments (similar to GitHub Codespaces). You will ensure the team has seamless, high-performance "dev machines" optimized for model experimentation. Tool Development : Build and contribute to open-source tools such as InferenceMAX and genai-bench to automate model evaluation, benchmarking and analysis. System Profiling : Use profilers like PyTorch Profiler, NVIDIA Nsight Systems and py-spy to collect performance profiles, identify bottlenecks, and debug the compute/networking stack. Monitoring & Observability : Develop real-time dashboards and alerts to monitor system health, model startup times, and runtime performance. Continuous Integration : Auto

PythonCI/CDGitRest
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Proactivity Research team, within OpenAI’s broader Personal AGI team, is focused on making our models in ChatGPT and future potential products proactive in ways that are truly useful. We're laying the technical foundations for AI that can anticipate what users need in real time, adapt as their goals and preferences shift, and build a deeper, evolving understanding of the person it's helping. About the Role As a Research Engineer / Scientist, you will research and develop improvements to our models’ personalization and agentic capabilities. Our team works on reinforcement learning, dataset creation, evaluations, and other post-training methods. We partner closely with research and product teams across the company to realize the vision of a highly personalized, collaborative, and proactive assistant. We're looking for individuals with strong ML engineering skills and research experience, especially with novel and highly capable models. An ideal candidate is passionate about product-driven research. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Own and pursue a research agenda to improve the proactivity and ability of our models to further user goals. Build robust evaluations for tracking modeling improvements. Design, implement, test, and debug code across our research stack. Collaborate closely with the other research and product teams to influence the shape of technical solutions in the product You might thrive in this role if you: Have a deep understanding of machine learning and machine learning applications. Have a working knowledge of LLM post-training and evaluation approaches Are passionate about, or have experience thinking about, personalization and enabling users to achieve their goals Are comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug. Thrive in a dynamic and technically complex environment. About OpenAI

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time· Remote
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -72.4%

$155K – $400K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

About Sentry Software runs the world and the pace is faster than ever. Sentry helps developers fix errors and performance issues before users notice, so teams can spend less time firefighting and more time building. Trusted by 200,000+ organizations, Sentry is today’s application monitoring standard and our team is building its AI-native future. About The Role The Security Team is responsible for securing all things Sentry: our customers, our code, and everything in between. We are a small but growing team with broad scope, high trust, and the autonomy to tackle hard security problems with creativity and an engineering mindset. We work at a company with a strong developer culture, building a product that millions of developers genuinely love and rely on. That context shapes everything about how we operate. As a Security Engineer on this team, you'll work across application and platform security domains. You'll contribute to the practices that keep Sentry secure as we grow: security reviews, threat modeling, vulnerability management, and embedding secure coding practices into an engineering organization that cares about doing things right. You'll partner closely with product and engineering teams to influence how features are designed and built from the start. You will work as a technical collaborator who helps make the secure path the obvious one. As Sentry expands our agentic product capabilities and development practices, you'll also find yourself at the frontier of a new set of security challenges. In this role, you will Support and help mature Sentry's security review program. From secure code review, to architecture review, and threat modeling. You'll help build the processes, tooling, and culture which make security a natural part of how we ship and operate. Contribute to mature vulnerability management practices. Intake, triage, prioritization, remediation tracking, and support of our bug bounty and responsible disclosure program. Advocate for secure-by-desig

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listingCompany trend -86%

$196K – $261K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

Who We Are Notion is the collaborative AI workspace where teams and agents think together . We're building one place where your knowledge, projects, meetings, and AI tools live side by side, so work is faster, clearer, and less fragmented. Millions of individuals, small teams, and large companies run their work on Notion. Notinos (our employees) are customer zero in bringing this future of work to life. We care about craft, building things that last, and the belief that great work is still fundamentally human. Our goal isn’t to ship the next feature. Each and every team of Notinos is working to set the standard for how humans work together in the AI era. From building a business’s system of record to making and managing AI agents to automating away the busy work, we care deeply about giving our customers more time for their life’s work. About The Role: Millions of people use Notion — and this number is increasing every day. That means millions of people trust us to deliver a fast, reliable, and secure experience, and we value this more than anything. We want to keep earning trust, while also continuing to amaze our users with the tools they can build in Notion. The Product Analytics Platform team owns the foundational systems that turn Notion's raw product signals into reliable and actionable insights at scale: how we instrument events, experiment and roll out features, define and trust metrics, and build analytics surfaces that interact with AI agents.. This is an early, high-leverage moment. You’ll join a newly formed team of talented engineers in our mission to build the best in class foundational platforms that are key to the company’s business and product. What You'll Achieve: You'll help shape a brand-new platform team and have real influence over the architecture and roadmap. You'll own critical infrastructure that spans experimentation, feature gating, event logging, schematization, governance and play a pivotal role in the development of systems, tools and

TypeScriptNode.jsCI/CDRest
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Personalization-Memory team, within OpenAI's broader Personal AGI organization, is focused on developing agents that can learn from prior interactions in order to become more helpful and efficient over time. We build general-purpose memory and personalization capabilities that transfer across ChatGPT and other agentic products, and we collaborate with applied engineering on the product surfaces that allow users to interact with memory. About the Role As a Research Engineer / Research Scientist on the Personalization-Memory team, you will research and develop improvements to memory usage and personalization in OpenAI's frontier models. Our team works on reinforcement learning, dataset creation, evaluations, and other post-training methods. We partner closely with research and product teams across the company to realize the vision of a truly personalized ChatGPT. We're looking for individuals who have a background in frontier model post-training, are able to iterate quickly, and who are passionate about product-driven research. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Own and pursue a research agenda for improving memory use and personalization in frontier models. Build robust evaluations for tracking modeling improvements. Design, implement, test, and debug code across our research stack. Collaborate closely with the research and product teams to influence the shape of technical solutions in the product. You might thrive in this role if you: Are passionate about personalization and building personalized assistants. Have experience working with user signals and human data to turn feedback into reliable signals for training and evaluation. Have a deep understanding of frontier model post-training and machine learning applications. Value principled approaches and research craftsmanship. Are comfortable diving into a lar

AWSRestMachine LearningAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Personalization-Memory team, within OpenAI's broader Personal AGI organization, is focused on developing agents that can learn from prior interactions in order to become more helpful and efficient over time. We build general-purpose memory and personalization capabilities that transfer across ChatGPT and other agentic products, and we collaborate with applied engineering on the product surfaces that allow users to interact with memory. About the Role As a Research Engineer / Research Scientist on the Personalization-Memory team, your work will span memory architecture, post-training, and developing long-horizon tasks for training and evaluations. We're looking for individuals who have a background in reinforcement learning research, are able to iterate quickly, and who can convert scientific rigor and long-term research into realized product impact. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Own and pursue a research agenda for improving long-horizon memory and personalization in frontier models. Build robust evaluations for tracking modeling improvements. Design, implement, test, and debug code across our research stack. Collaborate closely with the research and product teams to influence the shape of technical solutions in the product. You might thrive in this role if you: Love being on the cutting edge of RL and frontier model research. Value principled approaches and research craftsmanship. Are passionate about long-horizon tasks, memory, and turning your research into product impact. Are comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug. Thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic, and technically complex environment. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI syst

AWSRestAIGo
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the team The Computer Use and New Interfaces team is focused on discovering and building the next generation of AI-native interfaces. We believe that the value of AI is increasingly constrained not by model capabilities, but by the ways people interact with those capabilities. Our mission is to create new interaction paradigms that unlock the full potential of AI and integrate it more deeply into people's lives and work. Our team does both near-term product development and longer-term product incubation that can influence experiences across ChatGPT, Codex, future OpenAI products, and emerging device platforms. We work in a highly collaborative, design-driven environment where engineering, product, and design operate as one team. We value rapid experimentation, prototyping, and iteration, creating the shortest possible path between an idea, a working system, and a product decision. About the role We're looking for exceptional engineers who are excited to invent entirely new ways for people to interact with AI. You'll work at the intersection of engineering, product, and design to explore, prototype, and build novel interface concepts that push beyond traditional software paradigms. This role requires comfort with ambiguity, strong product instincts, and a willingness to move fluidly between experimentation and production systems. You'll help shape both the capabilities and the user experiences that define how people engage with AI. In this role you will: Design, prototype, and build novel AI-native interfaces and interaction models. Develop foundational technologies and frameworks that enable generative UI and computer use experiences. Collaborate closely with designers, product thinkers, and engineers to rapidly explore and validate new concepts. Build end-to-end prototypes and production systems that can influence future OpenAI products. Contribute to platform technologies that can be adopted across multiple product surfaces. Help establish technical directio

AWSRestAIRust
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

We’re looking for a Software Engineer to architect and build backend systems that enforce data privacy and automate compliance at scale. You’ll work closely with product, infrastructure, security, and legal teams to embed privacy-by-design into our data and access layers. This is a hands-on, high-impact role for an experienced engineer who is passionate about protecting user data while enabling innovation. What You’ll Do Design, build, and operate backend services that enforce policy-driven data access, lifecycle controls, and privacy protections. Develop distributed authorization and identity-aware enforcement mechanisms integrated directly into data services and control planes. Implement auditability, policy hooks, and enforcement observability to ensure compliance is continuously verifiable. Partner with Security, Legal, and Compliance to convert privacy requirements into scalable technical designs and developer-friendly APIs. Harden data platforms and backend services through schema-level controls and data handling constraints by default. Collaborate with infrastructure teams to ensure consistent enforcement across systems while minimizing duplicated implementations. Contribute patterns, libraries, and education that elevate trustworthy data access patterns across the organization. You Might Thrive in This Role If You Have 5+ years of industry experience building and operating backend or infrastructure systems in production. Strong software engineering fundamentals , with fluency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Python, Go, Rust, C++, Java). Experience with distributed authorization, RBAC/ACL systems, encryption-based access, or policy engines. Familiarity with global privacy regulations and their architectural implications. Ability to influence and collaborate with teams across legal, compliance, product, and engineering. A bias toward practical, impactful solutions that balance privacy protections with product needs. Nice to Have Experience wi

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Compute Strategy team works across research, engineering, product, finance, legal, and go-to-market teams to develop the partnerships, infrastructure capacity, and commercial models needed to advance AI infrastructure. About the Role As a member of the Compute Strategy team, you will develop commercial strategies for AI infrastructure partnerships and offerings. You’ll translate technical infrastructure opportunities into partnerships, transactions, and revenue. We’re looking for a commercially minded strategist who combines knowledge of semiconductors and AI infrastructure with strong financial judgment and the ability to execute complex partnerships. 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: Develop strategies for compute partnerships, vendor access, and infrastructure capacity. Structure and execute transactions with chipmakers, compute providers, and other infrastructure partners. Develop pricing frameworks and business cases for infrastructure-related partnerships. Evaluate partner technologies, strategic fit, commercial terms, and execution risks. Coordinate work across research, engineering, product, finance, legal, and go-to-market teams. Turn partnership learnings into repeatable operating models that can scale. You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience in strategy, corporate development, partnerships, or infrastructure transactions. Understand semiconductors and AI infrastructure. Can evaluate complex technical and commercial opportunities. Bring strong financial, analytical, and strategic judgment. Can influence and align technical and business stakeholders. Have negotiated or executed complex partnerships. Are comfortable operating in a fast-paced environment. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence ben

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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ High-confidence listing

$93.6K – $117K/yr

Quick readStrong listing-quality and freshness signals

Why join us Brex is the intelligent finance platform that enables companies to spend smarter and move faster in more than 200 markets. By combining global corporate cards and banking with intuitive spend management, bill pay, and travel software, Brex enables founders and finance teams to accelerate operations, gain real-time visibility, and control spend effortlessly. Brex’s AI-native automation and world-class service eliminate manual expense and accounting tasks for customers so they can focus on what matters most. Tens of thousands of the world's best companies run on Brex, including DoorDash, Coinbase, Robinhood, Zoom, Plaid, Reddit, and SeatGeek. Working at Brex allows you to push your limits, challenge the status quo, and collaborate with some of the brightest minds in the industry. We’re committed to building a diverse team and inclusive culture and believe your potential should only be limited by how big you can dream. We make this a reality by empowering you with the tools, resources, and support you need to grow your career. Data at Brex The Data organization develops insights, models, and data infrastructure for teams across Brex, including Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, and Operations. Our Data Scientists, Analysts, and Engineers work together to make data—and insights derived from data—a core asset across the company. What you’ll do As a Data Analyst II (DA), you will play a central role in enhancing the operational tracking and reporting capabilities of different business teams across Brex. You will work closely with Data Scientists, Data Engineers, and partner teams to drive meaningful insights for the business through visualizations, self-service tools, and ad-hoc analyses. This is a high-impact role in a fast-paced fintech environment where your work will directly influence strategic decisions. Where you’ll work This role will be based in our San Francisco office. We are a hybrid environment that combines the energy and connections of bein

PythonSQLGitAI
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📍 San Francisco, California, United States· Full-time
✓ Quality checkedCompany trend -80.2%

About the Team The Synthetic RL team develops reinforcement learning methods that leverage synthetic data, environments, and feedback to train and evaluate frontier AI models. The team explores approaches such as self-play, simulators, and other synthetic evaluations to push model capability, generalization, and alignment beyond what is possible with the current prevailing methodology. About the Role As a Research Scientist on the Synthetic RL team, you will develop novel reinforcement learning techniques that use synthetic environments and feedback to improve large-scale models. You’ll work closely with other researchers to design experiments, analyze learning dynamics, and translate research insights into training approaches used in production systems. We’re looking for researchers who enjoy working on open-ended problems, value fast iteration, and want their work to directly shape how frontier models are trained. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will: Research and develop reinforcement learning algorithms Design and run experiments to study training dynamics and model behavior at scale Collaborate with engineers and researchers to integrate successful approaches into model training pipelines You might thrive in this role if you: Have a strong background in reinforcement learning, machine learning research, or related fields Have strong engineering and statistical analysis skills Enjoy exploring new problem spaces where data, objectives, and evaluation are imperfect or evolving Are motivated by seeing research ideas influence real-world AI systems About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an ex

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