Researcher, Agent Safety, Training and Evaluations

Details

The Agent Safety team works to ensure that increasingly capable AI agents act safely, exercise sound judgment, and remain aligned with user intent. Its mission is to reduce the probability of severe unintended outcomes from increasingly capable AI agents while preserving their ability to act effectively and autonomously.

The team's work spans training methods, environments and data; evaluations and production metrics; and oversight and system mitigation mechanisms that reduce harmful actions while preserving useful autonomy.

This role is based in San Francisco, California, and follows a hybrid work model requiring three days in the office per week.

Responsibilities

• Train and evaluate frontier models to reduce harmful or misaligned agent actions, forming clear hypotheses and executing independently through ambiguity.
• Mine incidents and build scalable measurement, data-processing, and evaluation systems that turn real failures into repeatable safety signals.
• Collaborate closely with post-training, capabilities, oversight, and pre-training partners to ship research-backed mitigations into large-scale training and agent systems.

Requirements

• Demonstrated strength in research engineering, machine learning engineering, quantitative research, or applied model research.
• Ability to own ambiguous projects end to end.
• Excellent technical execution across experimentation, data, evaluation, and/or infrastructure.
• Strong intuition for modern frontier-model research.
• Motivation to work on agent safety and urgent, practical problems, even without prior safety or alignment experience.
• Excellent judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and an understanding of frontier model research.

Benefits

• Base salary of $380,000–$500,000 per year, plus equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health, dependent care, and commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time.
• Mental health and wellness support.
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage.
• Annual learning and development stipend.
• Daily office meals and eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional benefits may include charitable donation matching and wellness stipends.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law.