Research Engineer / Research Scientist / AI Systems Engineer, RSI

Details

The Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) team works across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure to build AI systems that accelerate and ultimately conduct high-quality research at OpenAI. The team automates real research workflows and improves research productivity by building systems and feedback loops, designing evaluations, and training models to develop missing capabilities.

The work spans the full lifecycle of model training, evaluation, and deployment to help researchers move faster and tackle increasingly ambitious problems.

This role is based in San Francisco, California.

Responsibilities

• Design evaluations for research judgment, hypothesis generation and testing, and long-horizon experiment execution.
• Turn real research workflows and model failures into data and evaluation flywheels.
• Improve model research capabilities through agent harnesses, synthetic data, reinforcement learning environments, and model training.
• Build and maintain safe, reliable integrations between models and OpenAI’s research infrastructure.
• Develop research agents, experiment-orchestration systems, and sandboxed runtimes that support real research workflows.
• Create metrics and economic models to understand RSI’s current and future effects on research productivity, model capabilities, and the safety of internal deployments.

This is a high-ownership role for researchers and engineers who thrive in ambiguity, move fluidly between research and implementation, and turn emerging opportunities into rigorous, reliable, scalable results.

Requirements

• Research or engineering experience across LLM training, model evaluations, agent systems, synthetic data, research infrastructure, or large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong generalist skills, with the ability to move between open-ended research and practical implementation and turn ambiguous problems into clear results.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across the full stack, including systems, data, model training, evaluations, and other research teams.
• Comfort building and maintaining the data pipelines, tooling, and infrastructure needed to support emerging AI capabilities.
• Comfort working on problems without clear definitions or established playbooks.
• Rigorous thinking about scientific quality, research taste, safety, privacy, reliability, performance, and scale.
• Enthusiasm for using increasingly capable AI systems to accelerate meaningful research.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company pushes the boundaries of AI system capabilities and seeks to safely deploy them through its products.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law. OpenAI is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Benefits

• Base salary of $295,000–$445,000 per year, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for employees and their families, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave, medical leave, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by applicable law.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.