Research Intern in San Francisco

Overview: The Data Acquisition team within the Foundations organization at OpenAI is responsible for all aspects of data collection to support our model training operations. Our team manages web crawling and GPTBot services and works closely with Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling teams. We are looking for a skilled Software Engineer to join our Data Acquisition team. Responsibilities: Own and lead engineering projects in the area of data acquisition including web crawling, data ingestion, and search. Collaborate with other sub-teams, such as Data Processing, Architecture, and Scaling, to ensure smooth data flow and system operability. Work closely with the legal team to handle any compliance or data privacy-related matters. Develop and deploy highly scalable distributed systems capable of handling petabytes of data. Architect and implement algorithms for data indexing and search capabilities. Build and maintain backend services for data storage, including work with key-value databases and synchronization. Deploy solutions in a Kubernetes Infrastructure-as-Code environment and perform routine system checks. Conduct and analyze experiments on data to provide insights into system performance. Qualifications: BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science or a related field. 4+ years of industry experience in software development. Experience with large web crawlers a plus Strong expertise in large stateful distributed systems and data processing. Proficiency in Kubernetes, and Infrastructure-as-Code concepts. Willingness and enthusiasm for trying new approaches and technologies. Ability to handle multiple tasks and adapt to changing priorities. Strong communication skills, both written and verbal. About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an

About Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and advancing toward AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments. Working across the full model and systems stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the physical constraints of real-world systems to improve people’s lives. About Role We are looking for an Operations Program Manager - Robotics Data Acquisition to own the day-to-day operating rhythm in our data collection facilities. You will work closely with operators, technicians, program managers, and engineers to keep rigs ready, campaigns moving, issues resolved, and performance improving. This is a hands-on operations role that requires you to be comfortable spending time on the floor, working through ambiguity, and using data to make the operation more reliable and efficient. This role is based in San Francisco, CA and requires in-person presence 5 days a week. In this role you will: Coordinate daily operations readiness across workstations, operators, materials. Track core operating metrics including utilization, cycle time, throughput, downtime, operator productivity, and data quality. Identify bottlenecks through workflow analysis, time studies, and capacity modeling, then drive practical fixes. Execute the rollout of new hardware, sensors, tools, and process changes with Engineering, Operations, Facilities, Supply Chain, and Safety. Identify equipment readiness issues and coordinate with technical support to keep workstations, and test equipment calibrated, configured, maintained, and ready for rollouts and evaluations. Lead root cause analysis for recurring operational issues and follow through on corrective actions. Provide operation input to create and maintain SOPs, work instructions, training materials, and process controls. Identify and flag resource constraints and manage issue escala

About the Team The Agent Post-Training 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 builds the data, environments, graders, training methods, and feedback loops that shape what OpenAI’s next agents can do and what they are like to work with, then carries those improvements through major training runs and into products used by people every day. About the Role As a member of the Agent Post-training Personality team, you will help make OpenAI’s agents exceptional collaborators. You will study what makes an agent thoughtful, clear, perceptive, appropriately proactive, and genuinely easy to work with, then translate those insights into evals, training data, reward signals, and model improvements. We use “personality” to mean much more than writing style or general likability. It includes whether an agent understands what the user is trying to accomplish, communicates with good judgment, adapts to context, asks useful questions, handles disagreement honestly and takes initiative at the right moments. The goal is to create a strong, tasteful default that can adapt to different people and situations. This work combines behavioral research, product thinking, research and communication taste. You will collaborate with product teams, human experts, and researchers across post-training and pretraining to ensure that improvements survive the full trai

About the Team OpenAI's Training team is responsible for producing the large language models that power our research, our products, and ultimately bring us closer to AGI. Achieving this goal requires combining deep research into improving our current architecture, datasets and optimization techniques, alongside long-term bets aimed at improving the efficiency and capability of future generations of models. We are responsible for integrating these techniques and producing model artifacts used by the rest of the company, and ensuring that these models are world-class in every respect. Recent examples of artifacts with major contributions from our team include GPT4-Turbo, GPT-4o and o1-mini. About the Role As a member of the architecture team, you will push the frontier of architecture development for OpenAI's flagship models, enhancing intelligence, efficiency, and adding new capabilities. Ideal candidates have a deep understanding of LLM architectures, a sophisticated understanding of model inference, and a hands-on empirical approach. A good fit for this role will be equally happy coming up with a creative breakthrough, investing in strengthening a baseline, designing an eval, debugging a thorny regression, or tracking down a bottleneck. This role is based in San Francisco. 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, prototype and scale up new architectures to improve model intelligence Execute and analyze experiments autonomously and collaboratively Study, debug, and optimize both model performance and computational performance Contribute to training and inference infrastructure You might thrive in this role if you: Have experience landing contributions to major LLM training runs Can thoroughly evaluate and improve deep learning architectures in a self-directed fashion Are motivated by safely deploying LLMs in the real world Are well-versed in the state of the art tran

About the Team Our 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 We are seeking a Lead Robotics Safety Engineer to define and lead the product safety strategy for our robotics program. You will work closely with leadership, engineering, research, legal, and policy teams to ensure safety is integrated into our products from the earliest stages of development through deployment. This role combines product safety, regulatory strategy, systems engineering, and risk management. You will help shape how we think about safety across robotic platforms, influence product architecture and development decisions, and ensure our systems are designed to meet both current and emerging regulatory expectations. You will serve as a subject matter expert on robotics safety standards, regulatory frameworks, and safety engineering practices while helping establish the long-term safety strategy for our products and organization. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. This role will be expected to be in office 4 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees. In this role, you will Define and lead the product safety strategy for robotic systems across the development lifecycle. Monitor and influence emerging regulatory frameworks, industry standards, and policy developments relevant to robotics and autonomous systems. Partner with engineering teams to translate safety requirements into product architecture, design decisions, and engineering requirements. Develop and maintain system-level hazard analyses, risk assessments, and safety cases for robotic products. Establish safety requirements, verification strat

About the Team Our 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 We are seeking a Senior Actuator Design and Integration Engineer to lead the development of custom electromechanical actuators for advanced robotic systems. You will own actuator development from early architecture and concept generation through prototype validation and system integration, partnering closely with mechanical, electrical, controls, firmware, reliability, and manufacturing teams. This role focuses on the design, integration, and validation of precision electromechanical systems, including motors, transmissions, sensing, structural components, and thermal architectures. You will help drive actuator development across the full engineering lifecycle while establishing scalable design, test, and integration practices for future robotic platforms. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Lead the architecture, design, and integration of custom robotic actuators, including motors, transmissions, sensing, thermal systems, structural components, and packaging. Define actuator requirements and system-level trade studies around torque density, bandwidth, efficiency, thermal performance, backdrivability, inertia, reliability, manufacturability, and cost. Design precision electromechanical assemblies with strong attention to tolerances, alignment, load paths, thermal expansion, sealing, wear, and serviceability. Drive actuator integration into robotic systems, partnering closely with controls, firmware, electrical, and robotics software teams to optimize closed-loop pe

About The Team The Data Understanding team is responsible for creating the high quality datasets and their quantized representation for OpenAI. This includes synthesizing data, building VQ representations, and processing, filtering, deduplication, quality control, and tokenization so it can be used effectively in big model training runs. About The Role We're looking to advance how OpenAI builds and understands pretraining data at scale. You'll treat data quality and curation as core research problems: developing new methods to select, combine, and transform data; creating datasets that improve model capabilities; and designing rigorous experiments to understand how data choices and interventions affect model learning and downstream behavior. You'll work closely with frontier models and web-scale data to build evidence for which approaches work and why, then translate successful research into scalable data processing pipelines We Expect You To Have a strong track record of new or improved ML ideas, through publications, projects, or applied research. Own and drive a research agenda, from choosing the right problems to carrying long-running work through to impact. Be excited by OpenAI’s empirical, collaborative approach to research. Nice To Have Thoughtfulness about AI’s impact, including privacy, provenance, and data quality. Experience building high-performance deep learning or large-scale data processing 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 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

About the Team Our 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 We are seeking a Senior Mechanical Engineer to lead the design, integration, and sustaining engineering of mechanical subsystems in robotic platforms. You will work closely with experienced engineers and cross-functional partners to set functional requirements, develop and iterate on hardware to meet program expectations. This role is aimed at candidates with strong fundamentals in mechanical system design — including tolerance, alignment, load paths, wear, and failure modes — and robotics. You will contribute to real hardware programs moving from prototype through early production. You will lead both new subsystem development and ongoing improvements to existing systems based on testing, field performance, and manufacturing feedback. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Lead the design and iteration of mechanical subsystems, including structures, mechanisms, and actuators. Create and maintain CAD models, assemblies, and drawings with appropriate tolerancing and documentation. Build and test prototypes, supporting debugging of mechanical issues such as fit, alignment, friction, and wear. Assist in developing test methods and executing validation to evaluate performance, durability, and failure modes. Work with cross-functional teams to integrate mechanical components with sensors, actuators, and control systems. Support transition of designs from prototype to manufacturable assemblies, incorporating DFM and DFA considerations. Collaborate with manufacturing partners

About the Team Our 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 We are seeking a Mechanical Engineer to design and prototype novel tactile, proprioceptive and force sensor solutions. You will work closely with experienced engineers and cross-functional partners to set functional requirements, develop and iterate on hardware to meet program expectations. This role is aimed at candidates with strong fundamentals in mechanical system design and robotic sensing including tactile sensors, force sensing and position sensing. You will contribute to real hardware programs moving from prototype through early production. You will lead both new sensor subsystem development and ongoing improvements to existing systems based on testing, field performance, and manufacturing feedback. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Lead the design and iteration of mechanical subsystems, including tactile sensors, load cells, force torque sensors and joint encoders. Create and maintain CAD models, assemblies, and drawings with appropriate tolerancing and documentation. Build and test prototypes, supporting debugging of mechanical issues such as fit, alignment, friction, and wear. Assist in developing test methods and executing validation to evaluate performance, durability, calibration and failure modes. Work with cross-functional teams to integrate mechanical components with sensors, actuators, and control systems. Support transition of designs from prototype to manufacturable assemblies, incorporating DFM and DFA considerations. Collaborate with manufact

About the Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and advancing toward AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments. Working across the full model and systems stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the physical constraints of real-world systems to improve people’s lives. About the Role We're looking for an experienced Electrical Engineer to help develop the next generation of robotic systems at OpenAI. This role spans the full lifecycle of hardware development, from early concept exploration and prototyping through circuit design, component selection, PCB layout, bring-up, integration, and deployment. Engineers in this role are expected to independently drive significant hardware efforts from initial concept through deployment. You will translate ambiguous goals into concrete engineering plans, make key technical decisions, coordinate closely with cross-functional partners, and own execution through the iterations required to deliver a successful system. Many of the systems we build are still being defined. You will work closely with mechanical, firmware, software, controls, and research teams to evaluate new ideas, develop novel hardware, and integrate it into robotic platforms. Success in this role requires strong engineering judgment, comfort operating in ambiguous spaces, and the ability to balance rapid experimentation with the discipline required to build reliable and scalable systems. The ideal candidate enjoys building things from first principles and is equally comfortable evaluating a new technology, debugging a prototype on the bench, reviewing PCB layout details, and driving system integration efforts. You should be able to move quickly when appropriate, but also know when investing in robustness, simplicity, or infrastructure will create leverage for future development. This role is

About Team Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and advancing toward AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments. Working across the full model and systems stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the physical constraints of real-world systems to improve people’s lives. About Role We're a growing hardware company. As we scale, we also need a supply chain that evolves and stays nimble to the changing shape and direction our engineers designs. Today we need someone who understands the iterative process of R&D but is also ready to expand into new product introduction (NPI), and after that, high-volume manufacturing. We're hiring for where we're headed, not just where we are today. This role prioritizes judgment, adaptability, and analytical ability over years of experience alone. A strong candidate will be able to reason from first principles, quickly develop expertise in new commodities, and identify potential commercial or technical issues before they affect the program. While extensive tenure is not required, this is not an entry-level position; candidates should have a solid foundation in strategic sourcing, supplier management, and hardware manufacturing. Over time, you'll help us build out a full supply chain organization: buyers, global supply managers (GSMs), contract manufacturing leads, and specialists across categories like precision machining, gears and mechanical components, EMS/PCBA, electrical components, and contract/JDM manufacturing. Where this role goes - into a specific commodity, into people management, into ops - will depend on where you're strongest and where the business needs you most. This role is based in San Francisco, CA and requires in-person presence 4 days a week and up to 30% travel to vendor sites. In this role you will: Partner directly with engineering during R&

About the Team Our 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 We are hiring a Sim Infrastructure Engineer to turn simulation systems into reliable, automated, production-quality pipelines that power model training, evaluation, and hardware-in-the-loop validation. This role owns the automation, orchestration, and tool integration that apply simulation to concrete robotics tasks: building CI/CD for SIL/HIL, presubmit checks, automatic model evaluation, metric computation and reporting, and the runtime infrastructure to run simulations at scale. You will collaborate closely with Sim Realism, Sim Environments, Research, and Ops to make simulation an integrated, reproducible, and measurable part of our ML and robotics workflows. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person 4 days a week. In this role, you will: Build and maintain presubmit checks, continuous integration and deployment pipelines for simulation code, environments, and tasks so simulation artifacts are testable, versioned, and reproducible. Implement end-to-end automation to run model evaluation in sim (SIL) and orchestrate HIL runs; compute realism and task metrics, generate dashboards and alerts, and ensure evaluation is repeatable and auditable. Create robust APIs and connectors so research, training, and data-collection systems can schedule, seed, and evaluate batches of simulations; support RL rollouts, imitation-data collection, and presubmit model checks. Build scheduling, batching and orchestration for running very large numbers of concurrent rollouts (target tens of thousands of rollouts / large RL workloads), sol

About The Team The Data Understanding team is responsible for creating the high quality datasets and their quantized representation for OpenAI. This includes synthesizing multimodal data, building VQ representations, and processing, filtering, deduplication, quality control, and tokenization so it can be used effectively in big model training runs. About The Role We’re looking to advance how OpenAI prepares, curates, synthesizes and understands multimodal data at scale. You’ll work on research and production problems like synthesizing multimodal content (images, audio, and video) and their supervisions, improving noisy data pipelines, building better quality filters, using models to automate data prep, and measuring whether changes in the dataset improve model performance. We Expect You To Have a strong track record of new or improved ML ideas, through publications, projects, or applied research. Own and drive a research agenda, from choosing the right multimodal data problems to carrying long-running work through to impact. Be excited by OpenAI’s empirical, collaborative approach to research. Nice To Have Experience with multimodal learning, audio, vision, video, synthetic data, or data-centric ML. Thoughtfulness about AI’s impact, including privacy, provenance, and data quality. Experience building high-performance deep learning or large-scale data processing 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 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

About the Team Our 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 We’re looking for a GPU Inference Engineer to contribute to improvements in model serving efficiency for our Robotics research. This is a high-impact role where you’ll drive initiatives to optimize inference performance and scalability. You’ll also be engaged in model design, to help assist our researchers in developing inference-friendly models. This role is critical to scaling the team’s broader goals - it will directly enable leadership to focus on higher-leverage initiatives by building a stronger technical foundation. In this role you will: Perform engineering efforts focused on improving model serving, inference performance, and system efficiency Drive optimizations from a kernel and data movement perspective to improve system throughput and reliability Partner closely with research and product teams to ensure our models perform effectively at scale Design, build, and improve critical serving infrastructure to support Robotics growth and reliability needs You might thrive in this role if you: Have deep expertise in model performance optimization, particularly at the inference layer Have a strong background in kernel-level systems, data movement, and low-level performance tuning Are excited about scaling high-performing AI systems that serve real-world, multimodal workloads Can navigate ambiguity, set technical direction, and drive complex initiatives to completion 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. About OpenAI OpenAI i

About the Team Our 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 You will work at the cutting edge of OpenAI's robotics hardware, partnering with hardware and software teams to develop, build, test, and iterate on robotic systems. Working closely with engineers, you will build prototypes, execute experiments, fabricate fixtures, troubleshoot hardware, and help drive rapid iteration on new robotic technologies. Your practical problem-solving and technical judgment will help move projects from concept to reality. We are looking for versatile, hands-on generalists who enjoy solving problems across mechanical, electrical, fabrication, and experimental domains. The ideal candidate will have strong experience in high-velocity and early-stage hardware development environments, provide thoughtful feedback to engineering teams, and help improve both hardware and development processes. This role will help accelerate robotics development by enabling fast, high-quality iteration on new hardware concepts and systems. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and is in-person 5 days a week. In this role, you will: Partner closely with engineers, researchers, and other members of the robotics team to support prototype development, experimentation, and hardware iteration. Build, modify, troubleshoot, and repair robotic systems and electromechanical assemblies spanning structural, electrical, sensing, and actuation subsystems. Design and fabricate fixtures, adapters, test equipment, and other prototype hardware that accelerate development efforts. Execute low-volume builds, engineering changes, and rework activities acro