Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Alignment

Details

The Alignment team at OpenAI focuses on ensuring AI systems are safe, trustworthy, and aligned with human values as they scale in capability. The team works on measurable alignment challenges, centering humans by developing mechanisms and interfaces for human intent expression and effective supervision of AI systems.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA and uses a hybrid work model (3 days in the office per week). OpenAI offers relocation assistance to eligible new employees.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement scalable solutions and experiments for alignment research.
• Develop and evaluate alignment capabilities that are subjective, context-dependent, and hard to measure.
• Design evaluations to reliably measure risks and alignment with human intent and values.
• Build tools and evaluations to study and test model robustness in different situations.
• Design experiments to understand how alignment scales as a function of compute, data, context length, actions, and adversary resources.
• Design and evaluate new human–AI interaction paradigms and scalable oversight methods for supervising models.
• Train models to be calibrated on correctness and risk.
• Design novel approaches for using AI in alignment research.

Requirements

• PhD or equivalent experience in computer science, computational science, data science, cognitive science, or a related field.
• Strong engineering skills in designing and optimizing large-scale machine learning systems (example: PyTorch).
• Deep understanding of alignment algorithms and techniques.
• Ability to develop data visualization or data collection interfaces (examples: TypeScript, Python).
• Experience designing experiments, evaluations, and robustness testing for ML models.
• Enjoy working in a fast-paced, collaborative research environment and contributing as a team player.
• Interest in building AI systems that are trustworthy, safe, and reliable in high-stakes scenarios.

Benefits

• Base pay within the listed range; total compensation may include equity and performance-related bonuses.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts (Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, commuter benefits).
• 401(k) with employer match.
• Paid parental leave, paid medical and caregiver leave.
• Flexible PTO for exempt employees; paid time off for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional company office closures.
• Mental health and wellness support; employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities.

Additional notes

• Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law.
• OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides information on its affirmative action and privacy policies to applicants.