Researcher (AI)

Location: San Francisco, United States

Salary: $380K–$500K annually, plus equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and benefits.

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company developing general-purpose AI intended to benefit humanity.

What you will do

• Develop scalable training methods across pretraining, reinforcement learning, and post-training to improve models' understanding of human values, support for user agency, and ability to help with long-term goals.
• Lead research from open questions through success criteria, experiments, and integration into frontier models and shipped products.
• Build reinforcement learning environments and evaluations for difficult-to-verify outcomes, including assessments grounded in human expertise and feedback.
• Study whether model-behavior measures predict learning, wellbeing, and other long-term outcomes, and use the findings to guide training.
• Build new 0→1 capabilities in human domains such as education and mental health and assess their impact on human flourishing at a scale of over one billion users.
• Partner with product, engineering, partnerships, and domain experts to deploy methods, measure real-world effects, and improve models.

Requirements

• Strong research record in pretraining or reinforcement learning/post-training, particularly in a hard-to-verify area, or strong LLM research skills combined with deep expertise in education, mental health, or a related human-benefit field.
• Hands-on ability to turn ideas into rigorous experiments, write and debug code, and work directly with data and training infrastructure.
• Ability to select consequential problems and actionable steps, including for ambiguous or unglamorous work.
• Ability to assess whether capabilities will scale, generalize, and reach real-world use beyond papers or prototypes.
• Ability to work across disciplines and identify the main bottlenecks to scaling impact in a multidisciplinary problem.
• Deep commitment to improving people's lives through increasingly capable AI.

Culture & Benefits

• Full-time, at-will employment with work based in San Francisco.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and families, with employer HSA contributions, plus FSA and dependent-care accounts.
• 401(k) plan with employer match, paid parental and medical/caregiver leave, paid time off, paid holidays, office closures, and sick or safe time.
• Mental health support, life and disability coverage, and an annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals, eligible meal-delivery credits, relocation support for eligible employees, and additional taxable benefits such as donation matching and wellness stipends.