Researcher, Alignment Training

Details

The Alignment Training team studies how frontier models acquire durable behavioral tendencies across the training stack. The team works on identifying which behaviors can be shaped through pre-training, mid-training, and post-training; building the data, objectives, and evaluations needed to influence them; and determining whether the resulting behavior reflects a general learned tendency or a narrow artifact of the training distribution.

About the role

We are looking for a senior researcher with exceptional technical depth in large-scale model training, synthetic data, or evaluation who is excited to study how training choices shape aligned behavior in frontier models. You will help shape the research agenda for alignment training: defining the behaviors we want models to learn, designing data and training interventions to teach them, and building the evaluation loops needed to tell whether those behaviors are broad, robust, and durable. Strong candidates can move from an ambiguous behavioral question to a concrete experimental program: formulate the hypothesis, design the intervention, build the pipeline, run the experiment, and decide whether the result is real.

This role is especially well suited for someone who wants to work close to the core model training loop, where choices about data, objectives, and evaluation directly shape how aligned deployed systems are.

Responsibilities

• Develop synthetic data methods that teach models higher-level behavioral tendencies, such as understanding user intent, following instructions reliably, reasoning clearly, being honest, and acting consistently with intended goals and constraints.
• Study how pre-training, mid-training, and post-training each shape downstream model behavior, and which interventions are best applied at which stage.
• Build evaluation loops that connect model behavior back to training data and training objectives to enable faster iteration with clearer signal.
• Design reusable data generation and filtering pipelines that improve the quality, diversity, and robustness of training data.
• Create experiments that distinguish durable learned behavior from benchmark gains, distribution-specific effects, or evaluation artifacts.
• Collaborate across pre-training, post-training, alignment, and product-facing teams to translate research insights into better model behavior.
• Help define the research agenda for alignment training: which behaviors should remain invariant across settings, which should adapt, and how to measure whether models have learned an underlying principle rather than a surface pattern.

Requirements / Qualifications

• Exceptional technical depth in large-scale model training, synthetic data, model evaluation, or training infrastructure.
• Experience working on pre-training, mid-training, or post-training interventions and studying downstream effects on model behavior.
• Comfortable designing experiments where the signal is subtle, noisy, or indirect, and moving between research formulation and engineering execution: forming hypotheses, building pipelines, running experiments, and analyzing results.
• Strong judgment about which research questions are worth pursuing and which signals are strong enough to trust.
• Ability to communicate clearly across research, engineering, and product contexts and to translate experimental findings into subsequent iterations.
• Interest in alignment problems and making models more useful, honest, steerable, and reliable for real users.

Benefits

• Base pay range listed in the posting and equity offered.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance 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 and paid medical/caregiver leave.
• Flexible PTO and paid company holidays and 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.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends) as applicable.

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 inclusion and provides reasonable accommodations for applicants with disabilities. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.