About the Team The Future of Computing Research team is an applied research team within the Consumer Devices group focused on developing new methods, models, and evaluation frameworks that support our vision for the future of computing. We work at the frontier of multimodal AI, helping turn emerging model capabilities into product experiences that are useful, delightful, and worthy of long-term trust. Our work explores a new class of AI systems that can learn over time, adapt to individuals, and support people in the flow of daily life. This includes long-term memory, user modeling, and personalization systems that are aligned not just with immediate satisfaction, but with a person’s broader goals, values, and well-being. We work closely across research, engineering, design, product, and safety to define what it means to build AI systems that know you over time, act at the right moment, and help in ways that are context-aware, respectful, and demonstrably beneficial. About the Role We are looking for a Research Engineer / Scientist to join the Future of Computing Research team to work on RLHF and post-training for personalized, multimodal AI systems. This role will focus on building the learning and evaluation foundations that help models become more context-aware, adaptive, and useful over time. You will work on problems such as reward modeling, preference learning, long-horizon evaluation, and policy improvement for systems that must make high-quality behavioral decisions in realistic user settings. The work is deeply product-grounded: success is not just higher benchmark performance, but better model behavior in real-world use. The ideal candidate is excited about pushing beyond one-turn assistant behavior toward systems that improve through feedback, learn from richer signals, and are trained against meaningful notions of user value. Internally, that maps closely to the need for careful reward design, feedback loops, and evaluation frameworks that test whether i
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Machine Learning Research Scientist in San Francisco
238 active opportunities · Updated October 2026
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Explore current machine learning research scientist jobs in San Francisco. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
Who Are We? Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman. P.S: We highly recommend reading The "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman. The Opportunity As an Applied Scientist specializing in Small Language Models and AI Training, you will lead research and development efforts focused on building efficient, high-performance language models tailored for practical applications. You will work closely with research, engineering, and product teams to advance model training techniques, optimize architectures, and scale AI solutions. Your work will directly contribute to AI systems that are safe, interpretable, and impactful across diverse usage scenarios. What You’ll Do Lead research and development of novel training methodologies and architectures for small and efficient language models. Design, implement, and evaluate model training experiments to improve performance, robustness, and generalization of language models. Collaborate closely with research scientists and engineers on scalable training pipelines and model deployment strategies. Develop techniques for model compression, fine-tuning, and domain adaptation to optimize models for real-world applications. Ensure AI safety, fairness, and alignment principles are integrated into model training processes and evaluat
About the Team The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models. Pushing the boundaries of data, scaling laws, optimization techniques, model architectures, and efficiency improvements to propel our science. The Search team sits within Foundations, building agentic search by co-designing model–system interfaces with the core search stack (serving, indexing, retrieval) to translate model intent into reliable, real-world actions. Operating at the frontier of AI and information retrieval, the team develops large-scale systems that transform and index vast corpora, enabling models to reason over global knowledge and act dependably. In close partnership with researchers, we rapidly bring modeling breakthroughs into production and redefine how intelligent systems discover, retrieve, and synthesize information at planetary scale. About the Role We’re looking for a researcher focused on our embedding retrieval efforts. You’ll work with a a team of world-class research scientists and engineers developing foundational technology that enables models to retrieve and condition on the right information, at the right time. This includes designing new embedding training objectives, scalable vector store architectures, and dynamic indexing methods. This work will support retrieval across many OpenAI products and internal research efforts, with opportunities for scientific publication and deep technical 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. Responsibilities Tackle embedding models and retrieval systems optimized for grounding, relevance, and adaptive reasoning. Collaborate with a team of researchers and engineers building end-to-end infrastructure for training, evaluati
About the Team The Alignment team at OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that our AI systems are safe, trustworthy, and consistently aligned with human values, even as they scale in complexity and capability. Our work is at the cutting edge of AI research, focusing on developing methodologies that enable AI to robustly follow human intent across a wide range of scenarios, including those that are adversarial or high-stakes. We concentrate on the most pressing challenges, ensuring our work addresses areas where AI could have the most significant consequences. By focusing on risks that we can quantify and where our efforts can make a tangible difference, we aim to ensure that our models are ready for the complex, real-world environments in which they will be deployed. The two pillars of our approach are: (1) harnessing improved capabilities into alignment, making sure that our alignment techniques improve, rather than break, as capabilities grow, and (2) centering humans by developing mechanisms and interfaces that enable humans to both express their intent and to effectively supervise and control AIs, even in highly complex situations. About the Role As a Research Engineer / Research Scientist on the Alignment team, you will be at the forefront of ensuring that our AI systems consistently follow human intent, even in complex and unpredictable scenarios. Your role will involve designing and implementing scalable solutions that ensure the alignment of AI as their capabilities grow and that integrate human oversight into AI decision-making. This role is especially well suited for someone who can move from an ambiguous model-behavior question to a concrete experimental setup: formulate the hypothesis, build the evaluation or intervention, run the experiment, analyze the result, and decide what the evidence supports. This role may be based in San Francisco or London, subject to team needs and location approval. In this role, you will: We are seeking research engineers and res
Who Are We? Postman is the world’s leading API platform, used by more than 45 million+ developers and 500,000 organizations, including 98% of the Fortune 500. Postman is helping developers and professionals across the globe build the API-first world by simplifying each step of the API lifecycle and streamlining collaboration—enabling users to create better APIs, faster. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and has offices in Boston, New York, Austin, Tokyo, London, and Bangalore - where Postman was founded. Postman is privately held, with funding from Battery Ventures, BOND, Coatue, CRV, Insight Partners, and Nexus Venture Partners. Learn more at postman.com or connect with Postman on X via @getpostman. P.S: We highly recommend reading The "API-First World" graphic novel to understand the bigger picture and our vision at Postman. The Opportunity As a Member of Technical Staff and AI Agent Development Lead, you will lead the design, development, and deployment of next-generation AI agents that interact with users and complex environments. You will drive the architecture and implementation of scalable, reliable AI systems, working closely with research, product and engineering teams to build safe, interpretable, and performant AI technology. What You’ll Do Lead a cross-functional engineering team focused on AI agent development, from conceptual design to production deployment. Design and implement AI agent architectures leveraging state-of-the-art language models and associated technologies. Collaborate with research scientists on scalable experiments and productize research innovations. Drive the development of agent capabilities including dialogue management, decision making, and autonomy. Ensure AI safety and alignment principles are integrated throughout the agent lifecycle. Mentor and grow technical staff, fostering an environment of collaboration and innovation. Evaluate new tools, frameworks, and methodologies to enhance AI agent capabilities. Partner
What you’ll do Partner with medical image reconstruction scientists / engineers to build ML components that improve reconstruction quality, speed, robustness, or quantitative accuracy. Define training/evaluation pipelines, datasets, and metrics that map to user needs and design requirements. Productionize models: inference performance, reproducibility, monitoring for drift/regressions, and safe fallbacks. Collaborate on hybrid algorithms, incorporating physics and learned priors, denoisers, learned regularizers, and quality estimation. Help build tooling for rapid experimentation as well as rigorous verification of algorithm changes. What we’re looking for Strong applied ML experience plus comfort with signal processing / imaging or adjacent domains. Ability to move fluidly between research prototypes and production-quality systems. Strong evaluation discipline: metrics, ablations, data leakage avoidance, and reproducibility. A demonstrated track record of applying ML to physics-based or inverse problems (i.e., shipped projects, a portfolio, or publications.) Useful experience ML for imaging/inverse problems (or adjacent) with strong evaluation discipline and comfort with GPU performance constraints. Pragmatic production mindset: reproducible training/inference, regression testing, and safe deployment in high-stakes contexts. A background in computational physics or scientific computing. Leverage ML-based methods such as PiNNs and Neural Operators to solve partial differential equations arising in ultrasound simulation and imaging. Experience in Agentic-SciML is a plus. Hands-on experience with data curation for ML: building datasets from messy, real-world sources, defining ground truth, and managing labeling or simulation pipelines. Background in data assimilation: combining observations with physics-based models (Kalman filtering, variational methods, ensemble approaches, or learned variants).
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 We’re hiring a Data Scientist to help build and scale our internal analytics capabilities. This is a foundational role where you’ll create dashboards, data models and insights to power business and product teams alike. You’ll collect requirements, define key metrics, and deliver insights directly to stakeholders. You'll define what success looks like across a technical, usage-based platform and turn ambiguous questions into analyses, forecasts, and experiments that shape Baseten’s product and strategy. RESPONSIBILITIES Build and maintain production-grade dbt models and dashboards across multiple functions with a focus on accuracy, simplicity and user experience. Define and instrument core metrics around ROI, product adoption, customer lifecycle, capacity, availability, revenue and costs. Ingest and transform raw data using tools like dbt, Airbyte, and BigQuery. Partner with Engineering, Finance, Marketing, and Sales teams to understand goals and translate them into data solutions REQUIREMENTS 5+ years of experience in analytics engineering, data analysis, analytics, data science or a related role Advanced SQL and dbt skills, with a record of building models, tests, semantic layers and lineage in a cloud data warehouse. Prior experience supporting complex cross-functional projects across GTM, Finance and Engineering across various stages of the customer journey. Experience building dashboards and self-serve analy
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 We're hiring a Product Data Scientist to establish how product decisions at Baseten are made with data. You'll work directly with Product and Engineering, alongside GTM to determine measurement, strategy, experimentation and implementation. This is a foundational, hands-on role. You'll define what success looks like across a technical, usage-based platform and turn ambiguous questions into analyses, forecasts, and experiments that shape product strategy. You'll work from clickstream and product events through inference telemetry and observability data, helping Baseten make faster decisions about reliability, performance, adoption and developer experience. RESPONSIBILITIES Partner directly with Product and Engineering: frame the questions that matter, define success criteria, and turn analysis into roadmap, launch, and prioritization decisions. Define how product success is measured: establish metrics across activation, adoption, retention, expansion, reliability and user experience. Support experimentation and launches: design measurement plans, analyze A/B experiments and controlled rollouts, and translate results into product decisions. Diagnose reliability and scaling behavior: join customer signals with request, replica, deployment, and cluster telemetry to find patterns in release bottlenecks, unhealthy replicas, and models without traffic. Define the enterprise customer journey and measure feature adoption
About the Role OpenAI’s Industrial Compute organization is responsible for ensuring our compute infrastructure scales efficiently to support millions of users and increasingly sophisticated AI models. We’re looking for a Data Scientist to partner closely with Capacity Systems Engineering, Infrastructure, Product, and Research to optimize inference capacity across our global GPU fleet. This role combines statistical modeling, large-scale data analysis, forecasting, and systems thinking to drive critical decisions around infrastructure investments, performance-efficiency trade-offs, and customer experience. You’ll transform complex operational data into actionable insights that directly influence how OpenAI allocates and scales one of the world’s largest AI compute environments. Key Responsibilities Build statistical and machine learning models to profile and improve GPU utilization, latency, throughput, and overall fleet efficiency. Develop forecasting models for inference demand across products, regions, and model families. Analyze production workloads to identify latency bottlenecks and capacity constraints, highlighting optimization opportunities. Partner with Capacity Systems Engineering to inform infrastructure planning and long-term GPU investment strategies. Design experiments and simulations to evaluate scheduling policies, serving strategies, and infrastructure tradeoffs. Build dashboards and operational metrics that enable leadership to make data-driven capacity decisions. Collaborate with Product, Research, Finance, and Infrastructure teams to align compute planning with business growth and model roadmaps. Communicate technical findings clearly to both engineering teams and executive leadership. Qualifications MS or PhD in Statistics, Computer Science, Operations Research, Applied Mathematics, Economics, or related quantitative discipline (or equivalent industry experience). 5+ years of experience working in the infrastructure data science space. Strong ex
About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. Achieving this requires bringing the world’s most exceptional talent under one roof to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Our Research Recruiting team plays a critical role in this effort. We are an embedded part of the research organization—working side by side with our research staff to deeply understand evolving priorities, build trust, and strategically shape the future of OpenAI’s talent. About the Role You’ll focus on identifying and engaging world‑class AI researchers and scientists who are advancing the frontier of machine learning and artificial intelligence. In this role, you will drive top‑of‑funnel sourcing efforts, build thoughtful outreach strategies, and cultivate long‑term relationships with highly specialized talent across academia and industry to support our Research teams’ hiring ambitions. You’ll work across a range of deeply technical and research‑oriented roles, mapping emerging fields, identifying leading contributors, and proactively engaging experts in their respective domains. You’ll partner closely with recruiters, hiring managers, and research leaders to surface exceptional candidates, generate strong pipelines for niche searches, and continuously refine sourcing strategies to help our research teams grow and scale. Your Responsibilities: Build highly targeted searches that deliver candidate profiles with precision. Craft thoughtful approaches to candidate outreach that will engage even the most passive talent and cultivate relationships with high priority targets over the long-term. Develop and utilize creative strategies to discover non-traditional, research-adjacent, and/or up and coming talent. Partner closely with hiring managers across OpenAI to develop customized sourcing strategies and advise them on the market. Take a highly organized and data driven approach to candidate tracking and funnel metrics. Represen
About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to build safe artificial general intelligence (AGI) that benefits all of humanity. Achieving this requires bringing the world’s most exceptional talent under one roof to push the boundaries of what’s possible. Our Research Recruiting team plays a critical role in this effort. We are an embedded part of the research organization, working side by side with our research staff to deeply understand evolving priorities, build trust, and strategically shape the future of OpenAI’s talent. About the Role You will own and execute long-term talent strategies to identify, engage, and recruit many of the world’s leading and emerging AI researchers, research engineers, and technical scientists working at the frontier of machine learning. This is not a traditional execution-focused recruiting role. You will operate as a strategic partner to OpenAI’s research staff, helping define hiring priorities, shape search strategy, influence candidate evaluation, and guide hiring decisions that directly impact the direction and quality of our frontier-model research and fulfillment of our mission. In this role, you will: Partner directly with research and technical staff to define hiring priorities, shape search strategies, and anticipate future talent needs as technical roadmaps evolve. Proactively identify and cultivate exceptional AI/ML research talent across industry, academia, and emerging labs, often before formal hiring needs exist. Use market insights and candidate signals to influence hiring decisions, leveling, and compensation strategy for highly specialized research roles. Serve as a trusted advisor throughout candidate evaluation and closing — helping leaders calibrate for research excellence, long-term potential, and organizational fit. Collaborate closely with your sourcing partner to execute complex, high-impact searches in ambiguous or rapidly evolving technical domains. You might thrive in this role if you: Significant experience recruitin
About the Team Our Safety Systems team is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency. The Model Policy team aligns model behavior with desired human values and norms. We co-design policy with models and for models by driving rapid policy taxonomy iteration based on data and defining evaluation criteria for foundational models’ ability to reason about safety. Key focus areas include: catastrophic risk, mental health, teen safety and multimodal safety. About the Role Providing access to frontier AI systems raises complex questions around dual-use science and catastrophic risk. How should models respond to requests involving chemical synthesis, biological experimentation, or pathogen research? Where is the boundary between legitimate scientific inquiry and information that could enable misuse? How do we design policies that meaningfully reduce risk without unnecessarily restricting beneficial research? This is a senior role in which you’ll help shape policy creation and development at OpenAI for addressing biological and chemical risks. You will develop structured policy frameworks and taxonomies to guide safe model behavior. This role sits at the intersection of biosecurity expertise, AI safety research, and policy design. You will help ensure that frontier AI systems can support beneficial life sciences research, such as drug discovery, public health, and biosafety, while reducing the risk that these capabilities could be misused. Our relevant publications: Preparedness framework Preparing for future AI capabilities in biology Safety evaluations hub OpenAI GPT5 System Card Evaluating Fairness in ChatGPT Improving Model Safety Behavior with Rule-Based Rewards OpenAI Model Spec Your Responsibilities: Design and maintain model policies governing chemical and biological risk, defining how models should safely handle dual-use scenarios. Develop structured taxonomi
About the Team The Safety Training research team aims to fundamentally advance our capabilities for precisely implementing safe behavior in AI models, and to leverage these advances to make OpenAI’s deployed models safe and beneficial. This requires a breadth of new ML research to address the growing set of safety challenges as AI becomes more powerful and used in more settings. Key focus areas include how to train nuanced safety behaviors, how to make the model robust to bad actors, how to address privacy and security risks, and how to make the model trustworthy in safety-critical situations. We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. About the Role We’re seeking a researcher to train and evaluate models for U.S. government use, with a focus on national security applications. You’ll advance safety post-training and robustness, helping models follow nuanced policies while preserving their usefulness and capabilities. In this role, you will: Research and implement methods for safety training, reinforcement learning, and adversarial robustness. Develop evaluations, identify model failure modes, and use findings to improve training. Work with research, engineering, security, and policy partners to support safe, reliable deployment. You might thrive in this role if you: Bring 4+ years of relevant AI safety research experience, including RLHF, adversarial training, or robustness. Have a degree in computer science, machine learning, or a related field, and strong deep learning research or engineering skills. Have experience improving model safety for deployment and enjoy collaborative research. Are motivated by OpenAI’s mission and the responsible use of AI in safety-critical settings. Security Requirements Active TS/SCI clearance or equivalent. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefi
About the Team The OpenAI 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 As a Research Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design and scale the infrastructure that powers large-scale multimodal training and evaluation at OpenAI. You’ll manage distributed data pipelines, collaborate closely with researchers to translate requirements into robust systems, and harden pipelines that serve as the backbone for OpenAI's rapid iteration cycles. We’re looking for engineers who are detail-oriented, have strong experience with distributed systems, and excel at building reliable infrastructure in high-stakes environments. 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: Design, build, and maintain data infrastructure systems such as distributed compute, data orchestration, distributed storage, streaming infrastructure, machine learning infrastructure while ensuring scalability, reliability, and security. Ensure our data platform can scale by orders of magnitude while remaining reliable and efficient. Partner with researchers to deeply understand requirements and translate them into production-ready systems. Harden, optimize, and maintain critical data infrastructure systems that power multimodal training and evaluation. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong experience with distributed systems and large-scale infrastructure with a strong interest in data. Are detail-oriented and bring rigor to building and maintaining reliable systems. Demonstrate excellent software enginee
About the Team The Future of Computing Research team is an applied research team within OpenAI’s Consumer Devices group. We study how AI systems perceive people and their surroundings, and we turn that research into capabilities for future products. Our work spans machine learning, sensing, and hardware, with a focus on building systems that work beyond controlled environments. About the Role We’re looking for a machine learning engineer to help shape how future AI systems understand the physical world and the people in it. The role focuses on multimodal perception and authentication, bringing together signals from cameras, microphones, and other sensors. You’ll work with specialized perception models and larger multimodal models, and partner with hardware, firmware, software, and product teams to bring new research into real-world systems. This role is based in San Francisco. We work in the office three days per week and offer relocation assistance. In this role, you will: Research and develop multimodal perception and authentication methods across visual, audio, and other sensing signals. Explore how specialized perception models and larger multimodal models can work together. Design data, training, and evaluation approaches that improve performance in real-world conditions. Study model behavior, robustness, and failure modes across sensing, data, and deployment environments. Integrate and validate new capabilities in real-time or resource-constrained systems. Work with hardware, firmware, software, and product teams to turn research into working systems. You might thrive in this role if you: Have a strong background in computer vision, audio or speech machine learning, multimodal learning, or sensing. Have experience developing specialized machine learning models, larger multimodal models, or both. Have brought research ideas into practical systems, prototypes, or products. Know how to design experiments, build evaluations, and investigate model behavior. Have wo
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