Machine Learning Engineer (AI)

Location: San Francisco, United States; hybrid

Salary: $381K–$510K annual base pay, plus equity and potential performance-related bonuses

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company developing and safely deploying general-purpose artificial intelligence products.

What you will do

• Build, deploy, and operate production classification and evaluation systems that provide feedback to post-training and research teams.
• Optimize production inference through model serving, batching, caching, throughput, latency, compute utilization, and cost improvements.
• Train and optimize classifiers using supervised fine-tuning and distillation, validating quality and efficiency before deployment.
• Own classifier reliability and observability, diagnose production issues, and improve deployed model performance.
• Design evaluations covering accuracy, calibration, generalization, and measurement bias while guiding production tradeoffs.
• Partner with researchers, data scientists, and software engineers to define modeling objectives, evaluation criteria, production requirements, and reliable rollouts.

Requirements

• Experience taking machine learning projects from problem formulation and experimentation through production deployment.
• Strong foundations in supervised learning, statistics, and experimental design.
• Practical experience evaluating models, investigating systematic errors, and working with imperfect labels.
• Strong software engineering skills and the ability to build maintainable production machine learning systems.
• Experience reasoning about inference performance and tradeoffs between quality, latency, and compute cost.
• Ability to combine scientific judgment with a practical approach to shipping and operating software.
• Comfort working closely with researchers and engineers on open-ended problems.
• Fluency in using AI agents to move quickly across multiple workstreams in a fast-paced environment.

Nice to have

• Experience with model distillation, representation learning, calibration, or efficient inference.

Culture & Benefits

• Hybrid work in San Francisco with relocation support for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match, paid parental and medical leave, paid time off, holidays, and sick or safe time.
• Mental health and wellness support, life and disability coverage, and an annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals, meal delivery credits where eligible, commuter benefits, and additional wellness and charitable matching benefits.

Hiring process

• More detailed benefits information is provided during the hiring process.
• Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.