Senior Researcher (AI)

Location: San Francisco, United States. Relocation support is available for eligible employees.

Base salary: $380,000–$500,000 per year, plus equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits.

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company developing general-purpose artificial intelligence and working to deploy it safely.

What you will do

• Lead the research and technical direction for evaluating and improving misalignment monitoring of frontier AI systems.
• Design rigorous evaluations to measure monitor effectiveness, identify failure modes, and assess monitoring signal reliability.
• Develop stress-testing and red-teaming methods to identify behaviors that evade detection or expose weaknesses.
• Investigate false positives, missed detections, and other monitoring failures to improve safety evaluation accuracy.
• Build scalable evaluation frameworks and experimental tools for measuring monitoring performance as model capabilities evolve.
• Translate research findings into practical improvements while establishing priorities and guiding technical execution across research, engineering, and safety teams.

Requirements

• Strong background in machine learning research, particularly in model evaluations, AI safety, alignment, robustness, or related areas.
• Demonstrated ability to lead technically challenging research projects from identifying important questions through experiment design and results delivery.
• Strong experimental judgment and ability to design evaluations that are rigorous, reproducible, and difficult to game.
• Hands-on experience building or evaluating machine learning systems, including large language models or other frontier AI systems.
• Ability to investigate complex failure modes and distinguish meaningful safety signals from misleading measurements.
• Comfort working on open-ended research problems where methodology and success criteria may initially be unclear.
• Strong research instincts combined with practical engineering ability to independently build experiments, analyze results, and iterate quickly.
• Ability to communicate technical findings clearly and collaborate across research, engineering, and safety teams.
• Motivation to support OpenAI’s mission and develop reliable oversight mechanisms for increasingly capable AI systems.

Nice to have

• Experience with AI monitoring, automated evaluations, adversarial testing, or red-teaming.
• Research experience in scalable oversight, AI control, model behavior analysis, or interpretability.
• Experience developing monitoring or evaluation systems used in real-world deployments.
• Technical research leadership experience, including mentoring researchers or coordinating cross-functional research initiatives.

Culture & Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and families, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, commuter accounts, 401(k) with employer match, and employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Paid parental, medical, caregiver, sick, and safe leave; flexible paid time off for exempt employees; and 13+ paid company holidays.
• Mental health and wellness support, an annual learning and development stipend, daily office meals, and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees and additional benefits such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.
• Work focused on advancing safe and responsible deployment of increasingly capable AI systems.

Hiring process

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