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 OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement . Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link . OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Jobs in United States
Research Engineer in United States
21 active opportunities · Updated September 2026
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Explore current research engineer jobs across United States. Filter by work mode, employment type, experience, department, date posted and distance.
Hiring demand
39/100
watch · 7 related jobs
Remote options
14.3%
Share of matching jobs listed as remote
Typical salary
$300K – $300K/yr
Based on 1 salary observations
About the Team The Personal AGI team is responsible for training and improving pre-trained models to be deployed into ChatGPT, the API, and potential future products. The team partners closely with research and product teams across the company, and conducts research as a final step to prepare for real world deployment to millions of users, ensuring that our models are safe, efficient, and reliable. About the Role As a Research Engineer / Scientist, you will research and develop improvements to our models. Our team works in research areas combining reinforcement learning and products. 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 model capability and performance. Collaborate closely with the other research and product teams, allowing customers to optimize their own models. Build robust evaluations for tracking modeling improvements. Design, implement, test, and debug code across our research stack. You might thrive in this role if you: Have a deep understanding of machine learning and machine learning applications. Have a working knowledge of relevant models, and building evaluations for model capability improvement. Are comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug. Thrive in a 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 systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement . Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link . OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
About the Team The RL and Reasoning team drives the core reasoning paradigm and has created groundbreaking innovations such as o1 and o3. They focus on pushing the boundaries of reinforcement learning research, building next-generation generative models, and deploying them at scale. About the Role As a Research Engineer/Research Scientist at OpenAI, you will advance the frontier of AI alignment and capabilities through cutting-edge RL methods. Your work will sit at the heart of training intelligent, aligned, and general-purpose agents, including the systems that power various models. We’re looking for people who have a background in reinforcement learning research, are able to iterate quickly, and are proficient at coding. 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. You might thrive in this role if: You love being on the cutting edge of RL and language model research. You’re a self-starter who takes initiative and ownership of ideas, driving them to completion. You value principled approaches, simple experiments in tightly-controlled settings, and reaching trustworthy conclusions which stand the test of time. You thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic, and technically complex environment where rapid iteration is key. You’re comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug and improve it. You have a deep understanding of machine learning and machine learning applications. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement . Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link . OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
About the Team The Privacy Engineering Team at OpenAI is committed to integrating privacy as a foundational element in OpenAI's mission of advancing Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Our focus is on all OpenAI products and systems handling user data, striving to uphold the highest standards of data privacy and security. We build essential production services, develop novel privacy-preserving techniques, and equip cross-functional engineering and research partners with the necessary tools to ensure responsible data use. Our approach to prioritizing responsible data use is integral to OpenAI's mission of safely introducing AGI that offers widespread benefits. About the Role As a part of the Privacy Engineering Team, you will work on the frontlines of safeguarding user data while ensuring the usability and efficiency of our AI systems. You will help us understand and implement the latest research in privacy-enhancing technologies such as differential privacy, federated learning, and data memorization. Moreover, you will focus on investigating the interaction between privacy and machine learning, developing innovative techniques to improve data anonymization, and preventing model inversion and membership inference attacks. This position is located in San Francisco. Relocation assistance is available. In this role, you will: Design and prototype privacy-preserving machine-learning algorithms (e.g., differential privacy, secure aggregation, federated learning) that can be deployed at OpenAI scale. Measure and strengthen model robustness against privacy attacks such as membership inference, model inversion, and data memorization leaks—balancing utility with provable guarantees. Develop internal libraries, evaluation suites, and documentation that make cutting-edge privacy techniques accessible to engineering and research teams. Lead deep-dive investigations into the privacy–performance trade-offs of large models, publishing insights that inform model-training and product-safety decisions. Define and codify privacy standards, threat models, and audit procedures that guide the entire ML lifecycle—from dataset curation to post-deployment monitoring. Collaborate across Security, Policy, Product, and Legal to translate evolving regulatory requirements into practical technical safeguards and tooling. You might thrive in this role if you: Have hands-on research or production experience with PETs. Are fluent in modern deep-learning stacks (PyTorch/JAX) and comfortable turning cutting-edge papers into reliable, well-tested code. Enjoy stress-testing models—probing them for private data leakage—and can explain complex attack vectors to non-experts with clarity. Have a track record of publishing (or implementing) novel privacy or security work and relish bridging the gap between academia and real-world systems. Thrive in fast-moving, cross-disciplinary environments where you alternate between open-ended research and shipping production features under tight deadlines. Communicate crisply, document rigorously, and care deeply about building AI systems that respect user privacy while pushing the frontiers of capability. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement . Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link . OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
About the Team The Codex Research team creates the frontier agents OpenAI ships to the world. We are training the models behind our agents in Codex, ChatGPT, the API, and other frontier products: persistent, proactive intelligence that can operate computers, collaborate with people and other agents, and expand what people and organizations can imagine, attempt, and achieve. We define what the next generation of agents should be able to do, build the training signal that teaches those abilities, and run the experiments that make them real. Our work spans coding, tool use, computer use, multi-agent coordination, long-horizon execution, factuality, instruction following, calibrated reasoning, and taste. Our team is where new model capabilities get made. We build the data, environments, graders, training methods, and feedback loops that shape what OpenAI's next agents can do, then carry those capabilities through major training runs and into the products people use. About the Role As a member of the Codex Research team, you will improve the capabilities, reliability, and product fit of OpenAI's agentic models. You might own a research direction, build the infrastructure that makes large training runs faster and more trustworthy, create evals that reveal where models fail, or drive a capability from an idea through experimentation, integration, and launch. This role is intentionally broad. The strongest candidates are not defined by one method or subfield; they are people who can take an ambiguous capability problem and make progress across research, engineering, data, evals, and product. You should be excited to work on models that act in the world: writing and debugging code, using tools, calling functions, operating computers, collaborating with other agents, and completing valuable work on behalf of users. You will work with researchers, engineers, product teams, infrastructure teams, and safety/alignment partners to decide what should go into major model runs, measure whether it worked, and ship improvements into products used by real people. This is a high-agency role for people who want their work to land directly in frontier models. In this role, you might: Design and run experiments that improve agentic model behavior across coding, tool use, function calling, computer use, multi-agent collaboration, long-horizon tasks, factuality, instruction following, and calibrated reasoning. Own end-to-end improvements to the post-training stack, including RL, data pipelines, graders, reward signals, evals, diagnostics, and model-behavior analysis. Build evals and environments that expose the next set of model failures, then turn those failures into training data, product fixes, or new research directions. Partner with Codex, API/platform, ChatGPT, and general-agent product teams to understand what users need and translate product signal into model improvements. Work on early-training and alignment interventions, including data mixtures, objectives, synthetic data, and eval loops that shape downstream agent behavior. Help decide which integrations, capabilities, and fixes are ready for inclusion in major model runs. Improve the machinery for large-scale training and launch: experiment velocity, reliability, observability, reproducibility, cost, latency, and production readiness. Take on cross-functional projects that touch model training, product infrastructure, and the production agent harness, such as multi-agent systems or training directly against production-like environments. Debug hard failures in shipped or near-shipped models and turn messy qualitative behavior into concrete hypotheses, experiments, and fixes. You might thrive in this role if you: Have strong technical fundamentals in machine learning, software engineering, systems, statistics, or a related field, and can learn quickly across the parts you have not worked in before. Have hands-on experience with LLMs, RL, RLHF/RLAIF, post-training, evals, graders, synthetic data, model training, coding agents, tool-using agents, or production ML systems. Are excited by open-ended problems where the path is unclear, the signal is noisy, and the right answer requires both research taste and engineering execution. Care about product impact and model behavior, not just benchmark movement. You have opinions about what makes an agent useful, reliable, honest, tasteful, and easy to work with. Can move from a vague behavioral problem to a concrete experiment: define the hypothesis, build the pipeline, run the model, analyze the result, and decide what to do next. Are comfortable working across research, product, infrastructure, data, evals, and safety boundaries, and can communicate clearly with each group. Like building load-bearing systems and processes when that is what the team needs, even if the work is not glamorous. Want to train and ship the models that make agents genuinely useful for developers, enterprises, researchers, and everyday users. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement . Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link . OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
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 systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement . Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link . OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
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