Research Scientist in United States

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 We are looking for a highly strategic recruiter to work closely with the Head of Research Recruiting on a small set of unusually important, high-touch searches and candidate relationships. This role will focus on exceptional talent who does not move through a standard recruiting process: highly visible researchers, technical leaders, operators, and other special-interest candidates where timing, discretion, market intelligence, and tailored engagement matter as much as process execution. This is not a conventional req-based recruiting role. You will help identify where the market is moving, develop intelligence on top talent and competitor activity, translate that intelligence into action, and orchestrate bespoke recruiting strategies for candidates who require a more nuanced path into OpenAI. You should be able to translate these signals and states into clear, actionable advice for leaders and then make it happen. In this role, you will: Partner directly with the Head of Research Recruiting and research leadership team to define priority talent targets and shape bespoke engagement strategies. Build and maintain deep market intelligence across frontier AI, research, engineering, and adjacent talent ecosystems, including competitor movement, candidate motivations, and relationship context. Proactively identify, map, and cultivate exceptional high-profile talent before there is a formal or standard hiring process attached. Translate weak signa

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 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 Software Engineer, Distributed Data Systems, you will design, build, and operate some of the largest distributed data systems in the world. You will be responsible for the end-to-end stack to deliver and consume top-quality data for robotics training at exabyte-scale. 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, large-scale systems 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 such as exabyte-scale distributed data processing, data selection, automated labeling, and training data loaders. 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. Deliver the best possible data for training robotics models. 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 a

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 seeking talented Robotics Software Engineers to expand our robotics data collection and evaluation program. This highly technical role involves designing, implementing, and optimizing software solutions across diverse robotics hardware. You'll work closely and collaboratively with multidisciplinary teams; including software, hardware, research, and operations - to drive advancements in our robotic systems. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person 4 days a week. In this role, you will: Help develop and grow our data collection labs, owning the entire integration lifecycle, from identifying and sourcing new hardware to collaborating with mechanical and electrical engineers on setup, software integration, and operational deployment. Develop innovative robot control interfaces suited to a variety of morphologies, environments, and tasks. Collaborate closely with research and engineering teams to develop automation tools and machinery that facilitate the evaluation of advanced robotic policies. Lead the design and implementation of data collection, visualization, and quality control processes. You might thrive in this role if you: Have 5+ years of professional software engineering experience developing and shipping production-quality systems in robotics or hardware-integrated environments. Have extensive experience integrating and deploying industrial automation systems, off-the-shelf robotics platforms, or custom hardware into production environments. Bring hands-on experience delivering production-quality software

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 We are building general-purpose robotics. In the short term, we are focused on robots to support skilled workers to build our future infrastructure. In the long term, we imagine everyone having a personal robot doing anything they need. Progress is rapid, and based on a foundation of co-design between robotics hardware and ML research. About the Role As a Firmware Engineer, you will define and drive the architecture of embedded systems for next-generation hardware products. You will own foundational firmware decisions across real-time execution, device bring-up, hardware interfaces, fault handling, safety mechanisms, and production readiness. We’re looking for someone with deep experience building safety-critical or high-consequence systems, where failures can have meaningful consequences. You should be comfortable reasoning about risk, designing for diagnosability and graceful degradation, and creating engineering practices that raise the reliability bar for the entire team. You should also be unusually good at moving fast. Sometimes the right answer is a carefully reviewed architecture that will endure for years; sometimes it is getting a rough-but-useful prototype working by the end of the afternoon so the team can learn something concrete tomorrow. We value engineers who know the difference, make that call well, and can operate credibly in both modes. You will be both a technical leader and a hands-on builder: setting direction, reviewing critical designs, unblocking the hardest problems, and writing production firmware when it matters most. Our embedded stack uses a lot of Rust. Extensive experience in the language is a big help! 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: Rapidly bring up new hardware and set execution pace for the team. Lead firmware architecture for embedded systems spanning boot, RTOS/runtime behav

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

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 lead the engineering, characterization, and productionization of flexible and compliant components in robotic platforms. You will partner closely with cross-functional teams to translate material concepts into engineered subsystems that meet functional, durability, and manufacturing requirements. This role focuses on understanding how soft materials behave in dynamic mechanical systems — including fatigue, creep, hysteresis, wear, and environmental degradation — and designing assemblies that perform consistently at scale. You will work with materials such as elastomers, foams, thermoplastic polyurethanes (TPUs), engineered fabrics, knitted and woven textiles, cables, and other flexible load-bearing or transmission elements, integrating them with rigid hardware, sensors, and actuators using fabrication methods such as bonding, molding, lamination, and sewn assemblies. This role is based in San Francisco, CA, and requires in-person presence 4 days a week. In this role, you will Design and integrate compliant or flexible materials into mechanical subsystems and rigid hardware interfaces. Leverage FEA tools to characterize material behavior under operational loads, including tension, compression, abrasion, fatigue, and environmental exposure. Develop test methods and validation protocols to evaluate durability, performance, and failure modes of soft components. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to transition early prototypes into manufacturable designs. Source and evaluate materials in collaboratio