Machine Learning Researcher in San Francisco

About the Team Our Inference team brings OpenAI’s most capable research and technology to the world through our products. We empower consumers, enterprise and developers alike to use and access our start-of-the-art AI models, allowing them to do things that they’ve never been able to before. We focus on performant and efficient model inference, as well as accelerating research progression via model inference. About the Role We are looking for an engineer who wants to take the world's largest and most capable AI models and optimize them for use in a high-volume, low-latency, and high-availability production and research environment. In this role, you will: Work alongside machine learning researchers, engineers, and product managers to bring our latest technologies into production. Work alongside researchers to enable advanced research through awesome engineering. Introduce new techniques, tools, and architecture that improve the performance, latency, throughput, and efficiency of our model inference stack. Build tools to give us visibility into our bottlenecks and sources of instability and then design and implement solutions to address the highest priority issues. Optimize our code and fleet of Azure VMs to utilize every FLOP and every GB of GPU RAM of our hardware. You might thrive in this role if you: Have an understanding of modern ML architectures and an intuition for how to optimize their performance, particularly for inference. Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done. Have at least 5 years of professional software engineering experience. Have or can quickly gain familiarity with PyTorch, NVidia GPUs and the software stacks that optimize them (e.g. NCCL, CUDA), as well as HPC technologies such as InfiniBand, MPI, NVLink, etc. Have experience architecting, building, observing, and debugging production distributed systems. Bonus point if worked on performance-critical distributed systems. Have need

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 Monetization team is a new cross-functional group working across engineering, product, research, and design to build the foundational systems that will help OpenAI scale access to intelligence responsibly. Our mission is to develop user-first, privacy-preserving monetization products—including next-generation ads experiences—that strengthen user trust, unlock economic opportunity, and support OpenAI’s long-term innovation. Monetization plays a critical role in enabling OpenAI to continue pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities while ensuring the benefits of AGI are broadly shared. We believe monetization must be aligned with user value, uphold rigorous privacy and safety standards, and sustain a healthy ecosystem of developers and businesses. This team operates in a greenfield environment and moves quickly through prototyping, experimentation, and iterative deployment. We partner closely with Product, Design, and Research to bring research breakthroughs into real-world systems at global scale. About the Role As a Research Engineer in OpenAI's Monetization Group, you will have the opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds in AI. You'll contribute to deploying state-of-the-art models in production environments, helping turn research breakthroughs into tangible solutions. If you're excited about making AI technology accessible and impactful, this role is your chance to make a significant mark. In this role, you will: Innovate and Deploy: Design and deploy advanced machine learning models that solve real-world problems. Bring OpenAI's research from concept to implementation, creating AI-driven applications with a direct impact. Collaborate with the Best: Work closely with researchers, software engineers, and product managers to understand complex business challenges and deliver AI-powered solutions. Be part of a dynamic team where ideas flow freely and creativity thrives. Optimize and Scale: Implement scalable data pipelines, optimize mod

About the Team The Integrity team at OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that our cutting-edge technology is not only revolutionary, but also secure from a myriad of adversarial threats. We strive to maintain the integrity of our platforms as they scale. The Integrity team is at the front lines of defending against misuse in all its forms: content abuse, scaled attacks, and other actions that could undermine the user experience or harm our operational stability. About the Role As a Machine Learning Engineer in OpenAI's Integrity team, you will have the opportunity to work with some of the brightest minds in AI. You’ll work on state-of-the-art models and classifiers, experiment with new architecture and approaches, and push forward our abilities in content and user understanding. You’ll help turn research breakthroughs into tangible solutions that improve the trust and safety of our platform. If you're excited about training LLMs and building ML models, this role is your chance to make a significant mark. In this role, you will: Innovate and Deploy: Design and deploy advanced machine learning models that solve real-world problems. Bring OpenAI's research from concept to implementation, creating AI-driven applications with a direct impact. Collaborate with the Best: Work closely with researchers, software engineers, and product managers to understand complex business challenges and deliver AI-powered solutions. Be part of a dynamic team where ideas flow freely and creativity thrives. Optimize and Scale: Implement scalable data pipelines, optimize models for performance and accuracy, and ensure they are production-ready. Contribute to projects that require cutting-edge technology and innovative approaches. Learn and Lead: Stay ahead of the curve by engaging with the latest developments in machine learning and AI. Take part in code reviews, share knowledge, and lead by example to maintain high-quality engineering practices. Make a Difference: Monitor and maintain deployed m

About the Team The Strategic Finance team at OpenAI plays a critical role in shaping the company’s long-term trajectory. We partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Go-To-Market teams to inform high-stakes decisions through rigorous data science and economic modeling. As part of our expanding Data Science function, we’re building a best-in-class Forecasting capability to drive real-time, data-driven decision-making across user growth, revenue, compute infrastructure, and more. We are developing scalable forecasting infrastructure to help us understand and anticipate business dynamics in an increasingly complex, usage-based world. Our models are foundational to planning, pricing, operational efficiency, and growth strategy - supporting key investment decisions and unlocking OpenAI’s full potential. About the Role We’re looking for a senior Machine Learning Data Scientist to lead our forecasting initiatives. You’ll be one of the founding members of the Forecasting pillar within Strategic Finance Data Science, responsible for building and scaling robust, interpretable, and production-ready forecasting systems. Your models will power critical business decisions by predicting core metrics such as DAU/WAU, revenue, LTV, compute consumption, and profitability. This is a highly cross-functional role, requiring technical excellence, strong product intuition, and business acumen. You’ll collaborate with product managers, researchers, engineers, and finance leaders to operationalize forecasting insights, influence company-wide strategy, and build foundational forecasting capabilities at OpenAI. 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: Build statistical and machine learning models to solve forecasting needs across product, finance, infrastructure, and GTM domains. Own the end-to-end modeling lifecycle , including scoping, feature engineerin

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 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

About the Team The Interpretability team studies internal representations of deep learning models. We are interested in using representations to understand model behavior, and in engineering models to have more understandable representations. We are particularly interested in applying our understanding to ensure the alignment of powerful AI systems. Our working style is collaborative and curiosity-driven. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a researcher passionate about understanding deep networks, with a strong background in engineering, quantitative reasoning, and the research process. You will develop and carry out a research plan in mechanistic interpretability, in close collaboration with a highly motivated team. You will play a critical role in helping OpenAI ensure future models remain safe even as they grow in capability. This will make a significant impact on our goal of building and deploying safe AGI. In this role, you will: Develop and publish research on techniques for understanding representations of deep networks. Engineer infrastructure for studying model internals at scale. Collaborate across teams to work on projects that OpenAI is uniquely suited to pursue. Guide research directions toward demonstrable usefulness and/or long-term scalability. You might thrive in this role if you: Are excited about OpenAI’s mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity, and are aligned with OpenAI’s charter . Show enthusiasm for long-term AI safety & alignment, and have thought deeply about technical paths to safe AGI. Bring experience in the field of AI safety & alignment, mechanistic interpretability, or spiritually related disciplines. Hold a Ph.D. or have research experience in computer science, machine learning, or a related field. Thrive in environments involving large-scale AI systems, and are excited to make use of OpenAI’s unique resources in this area. Possess 2+ years of research engineering experience and proficiency in Python or similar languag

About the Team The Interpretability team studies internal representations of deep learning models. We are interested in using representations to understand model behavior, and in engineering models to have more understandable representations. We are particularly interested in applying our understanding to ensure the safety of powerful AI systems. Our working style is collaborative and curiosity-driven. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a researcher passionate about understanding deep networks, with a strong background in engineering, quantitative reasoning, and the research process. You will develop and carry out a research plan in mechanistic interpretability, in close collaboration with a highly motivated team. You will play a critical role in helping OpenAI ensure future models remain safe even as they grow in capability. This will make a significant impact on our goal of building and deploying safe AGI. In this role, you will: Develop and publish research on techniques for understanding representations of deep networks. Engineer infrastructure for studying model internals at scale. Collaborate across teams to work on projects that OpenAI is uniquely suited to pursue. Guide research directions toward demonstrable usefulness and/or long-term scalability. You might thrive in this role if you: Are excited about OpenAI’s mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity, and are aligned with OpenAI’s charter . Show enthusiasm for long-term AI safety, and have thought deeply about technical paths to safe AGI. Bring experience in the field of AI safety, mechanistic interpretability, or spiritually related disciplines. Hold a Ph.D. or have research experience in computer science, machine learning, or a related field. Thrive in environments involving large-scale AI systems, and are excited to make use of OpenAI’s unique resources in this area. Possess 2+ years of research engineering experience and proficiency in Python or similar languages. Are deeply curious. About OpenA

About the Team The Safety Systems team is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit the society and 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 Safety Research team aims to fundamentally advance our capabilities for precisely implementing robust, 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 enforce nuanced safety policies without trading off helpfulness and capabilities, how to make the model robust to adversaries, how to address privacy and security risks, and how to make the model trustworthy in safety-critical domains. 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 OpenAI is seeking a senior researcher with passion for AI safety and experience in safety research. Your role will set directions for research to enable and empower safe AGI and work on research projects to make our AI systems safer, more aligned and more robust to adversarial or malicious use cases. You will play a critical role in shaping how a safe AI system should look like in the future at OpenAI, making a significant impact on our mission to build and deploy safe AGI. In this role, you will: Conduct state-of-the-art research on AI safety topics such as RLHF, adversarial training, robustness, and more. Implement new methods in OpenAI’s core model training and launch safety improvements in OpenAI’s products. Set the research directions and strategies to make our AI systems safer, more aligned and more robust. Coordinate and collaborate with cross-functional team

About the Team Models are becoming increasingly capable—moving from tools that assist humans to agents that can plan, execute, and adapt in the real world. Mitigating the frontier risks resulting from these capabilities is paramount to OpenAI’s ability to continue deploying models safely. The Preparedness team is dedicated to addressing these critical risks. Our work includes: Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems. Mitigation. Keeping misuse and misalignment safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future. Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework , and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets. This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society. About the Role We are seeking exceptional researchers who can push the frontier of safety mitigations. You will help derisk frontier models by developing novel safety mitigations, developing and applying new techniques from domains like interpretability, control, and alignment to ensure the safety of OpenAI’s deployed models. You will play a critical role in defining how a safe AI system should look in the future at OpenAI, making a significant impact on our mission to build and deploy safe AGI. This role requires strong technical depth and close cross-functional collaboration to ensure our safety mitigations are enforceable, scalable, and effective. We seek researchers who can partner with experts across domains such as misalignment, cybersecurity, and biology in order to develop the best possible end-to-end safety stack. In this role, you will: Work on identifying emerging AI safety risks and new methodologies for exploring and mitigating the impact of such risks Build (and then continuously refine) the evaluations that enable us to assess the extent of these risks; this might include worki

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

About the Team The Safety Systems team is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit the society, and 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 Safety Oversight Research team aims to fundamentally advance our capabilities to maintain oversight over frontier AI models, and leverage these advances to ensure OpenAI’s deployed models are safe and beneficial. This requires a breadth of new ML research in the areas of human-AI collaboration, reasoning, robustness, and scalable oversight to keep pace with model capabilities. We invest heavily in developing novel model and system-level methods of identifying and mitigating AI misuse and misalignment. Our goal is to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. About the Role OpenAI is seeking a senior researcher with a passion for AI safety and experience in safety research. Your role will set directions for research to maintain effective oversight of safe AGI and work on research projects to identify and mitigate misuse and misalignment in our AI systems. You will play a critical role in defining how a safe AI system should look in the future at OpenAI, making a significant impact on our mission to build and deploy safe AGI. In this role, you will: Develop and refine AI monitor models to detect and mitigate known and emerging patterns of misuse and misalignment. Set research directions and strategies to make our AI systems safer, more aligned, and more robust. Evaluate and design effective red-teaming pipelines to examine the end-to-end robustness of our safety systems, and identify areas for future improvement. Conduct research to improve models’ ability to reason about questions of human values, and apply these improved models to practical safety challen

About the Team OpenAI Consumer Devices is building the next generation of products that bring powerful AI into people’s everyday lives. Guided by OpenAI’s mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, our team combines world-class researchers, engineers, designers, and operators who care deeply about creating useful, intuitive, and responsible technology. You’ll have the opportunity to work alongside exceptional people on ambitious, zero-to-one challenges at the intersection of hardware, software, and AI. This is a chance to help define an entirely new category of products—and shape how people experience AI in the future. Our team works across silicon, embedded systems, operating systems, and cloud services to build reliable consumer devices and the novel platforms required to support them. We partner closely with research to bring advanced AI capabilities into the physical world. About the Role As an Operating Systems Engineer focused on on-device inference, you will design, develop, and ship the OS stack that makes advanced AI capabilities reliable, responsive, and energy efficient on consumer devices. Your work will span OS services and frameworks, inference runtime integration, model fitting, scheduling, and performance and power management. You’ll partner with research to adapt models to device constraints, make design decisions across the stack, and carry solutions from early exploration through integration and production. In this role, you will: Build the inference platform: Design and implement maintainable OS services, frameworks, and clear interfaces for inference execution, model loading and lifecycle, and resource management. Fit models to device constraints: Partner with researchers on quantization, runtime integration, and memory optimization to meet memory, compute, and energy budgets while evaluating model quality and product behavior. Coordinate system resources: Develop scheduling and resource policies that balance inference with other device act

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. ABOUT BASE LABS Base Labs is a research lab pushing the frontier of open-source LLMs. We think intelligence should be democratized, not controlled by a handful of closed labs and we think very few teams are actually positioned to do something about that. Backed by Baseten's training and inference infrastructure, we have the compute, resources, and talent to take on hard problems at the frontier and open-source what we learn along the way. Our mission is to help build a world where intelligence isn't concentrated, but spread across an ecosystem of models that anyone can build on. That mission shapes what we choose to work on, how we work on it, and who we want in the room. We are accepting applications on a rolling basis for our first cohort of Base Labs Fellows, which is expected to start in late September. Apply using this link. BASE LABS FELLOWSHIP OVERVIEW The Base Labs Fellowship is designed to give researchers exposure to what frontier research looks like in industry. We provide funding, mentorship, and full support to our fellows, with the goal of producing rigorous, published research that shapes both the open-source ecosystem and Baseten's technical roadmap. We run multiple cohorts of Fellows each year and review applications on a rolling basis. This application is for cohorts starting in Sept 2026 and beyond. WHAT TO EXPECT 3 months of full-time research from our San Francisco office A dedicated 1:1 mentorship