Researcher, Agent Post-Training, Personality

Details

About the Team

The Agent Post-Training team creates the frontier agents OpenAI ships to the world. We are training the models behind our agents in Codex, ChatGPT, the API, and other frontier products: persistent, proactive intelligence that can operate computers, collaborate with people and other agents, and expand what people and organizations can imagine, attempt, and achieve.

We define what the next generation of agents should be able to do, build the training signal that teaches those abilities, and run the experiments that make them real. Our work spans coding, tool use, computer use, multi-agent coordination, long-horizon execution, factuality, instruction following, calibrated reasoning, and taste.

Our team builds the data, environments, graders, training methods, and feedback loops that shape what OpenAI’s next agents can do and what they are like to work with, then carries those improvements through major training runs and into products used by people every day.

About the Role

As a member of the Agent Post-training Personality team, you will help make OpenAI’s agents exceptional collaborators. You will study what makes an agent thoughtful, clear, perceptive, appropriately proactive, and genuinely easy to work with, then translate those insights into evals, training data, reward signals, and model improvements.

We use “personality” to mean much more than writing style or general likability. It includes whether an agent understands what the user is trying to accomplish, communicates with good judgment, adapts to context, asks useful questions, handles disagreement honestly and takes initiative at the right moments. The goal is to create a strong, tasteful default that can adapt to different people and situations.

This work combines behavioral research, product thinking, research and communication taste. You will collaborate with product teams, human experts, and researchers across post-training and pretraining to ensure that improvements survive the full training stack and reach the models people use every day.

Responsibilities

• Develop a rigorous understanding of what makes an agent a great collaborator across professional, creative, technical, and everyday work.
• Turn qualitative judgments about model behavior into concrete hypotheses, evals, graders, and training interventions.
• Study explicit and implicit user signals to understand which behaviors create trust, satisfaction, continued use, and successful outcomes.
• Work with human experts and trainers to produce high-quality, tasteful rollouts and preference data that capture excellent collaborative behavior.
• Improve reward models and RL objectives for model behaviors.
• Work with pretraining and early-training teams on data mixtures, objectives, synthetic data, and other upstream choices that shape downstream personality.
• Build sustainable pipelines for updating older training data as our understanding of excellent model behavior evolves.
• Partner closely with ChatGPT, Codex, and other product teams to turn consumer insight into model improvements and validate them in real workflows.
• Own projects end to end, from observing a subtle behavioral failure through experimentation, training, evaluation, and launch.

Requirements

• Strong technical foundations in machine learning, software engineering, statistics, behavioral science, HCI, or a related field, with the ability to learn across unfamiliar parts of the stack.
• Experience with LLMs, post-training, RL/RLHF, reward modeling, evals, synthetic data, pretraining data, or production ML systems.
• Ability to translate subjective product questions into falsifiable hypotheses and rigorous evaluations while preserving nuance.
• Experience working effectively with researchers, engineers, product teams, designers, domain experts, human-data teams, and safety boundaries; clear communication with each group.
• Comfort with ambiguous capability problems where signals are noisy and failures are qualitative; solutions may involve data, training, evals, product changes, or combinations of these.
• Taste for model behavior and the ability to explain why responses feel thoughtful, natural, and useful.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit).
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks).
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees.
• 13+ paid company holidays and multiple company office closures throughout the year, plus paid sick or safe time as required by law.
• 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.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends, etc.).