Research Engineer, Notifications

Details

About the Team

The ChatGPT team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to the world. The team seeks to learn from deployment and broadly distribute the benefits of AI while ensuring responsible and safe use. The group aims to make tools globally accessible and to generate rigorous insights into how people use products.

About the Role

We are looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to join the Notifications team, focused on building and scaling intelligent notification systems that provide real value to users even when they are not actively on the product. This role centers on shaping how ChatGPT communicates proactively and helpfully with users — surfacing the right content, at the right time, through the right channel. You will design and implement ranking and recommendation systems that leverage classical ML techniques and large language models (LLMs) to optimize notification relevance, timeliness, and user experience. The role requires strong ML fundamentals, experience shipping ranking or recommendation systems in production, exposure to LLMs, and product intuition. This position is based in San Francisco, CA and uses a hybrid work model (3 days in office per week). The role offers relocation assistance for new employees.

Responsibilities

• Design and build end-to-end ranking and recommendation systems for notifications, covering modeling, evaluation, and deployment.
• Apply and adapt LLMs to ranking problems, including prompt-based approaches and fine-tuning.
• Develop experiments to evaluate notification relevance, user value, and long-term impact; collaborate with product, data science, and engineering teams.
• Collaborate with research teams to leverage the latest modeling techniques while balancing production constraints.
• Build robust offline and online evaluations to measure system improvements and user outcomes.
• Contribute to the broader Growth ML stack and help set technical direction for intelligent user engagement systems.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience building and deploying ranking, recommendation, or personalization systems at scale.
• Deep understanding of machine learning and its applications, with exposure to LLMs and their integration into product experiences.
• Experience in experimentation, A/B testing, and analyzing impact on user behavior and business metrics.
• Comfortable working in large ML codebases, designing evaluations, and debugging complex modeling issues.
• Ability to think from first principles, design elegant solutions, and balance modeling sophistication with product impact.
• Strong product intuition and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Benefits & Compensation

• Base salary range: $325,000 - $590,000 per year. Offers equity.
• In addition to base pay, total compensation may include equity, performance-related bonuses (for eligible employees), and other benefits.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts (Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, commuter expenses).
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave, paid medical and caregiver leave, flexible PTO, paid company holidays, and paid sick/safe time as required by law.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend; daily office meals and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company emphasizes safety and human needs in AI development and values diverse perspectives and experiences. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.