Researcher, Context - Agent Post-Training

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 is where new model capabilities get made. We build the data, environments, graders, training methods, and feedback loops that shape what OpenAI's next agents can do, then carry those capabilities through major training runs and into the products people use.

About the Role

We believe that the final enabler for AGI is spending compute on context. As a Context Researcher on Agent Post-Training, you will scale compute spent on context. You will get to work in our frontier training stack on enabling the next paradigm of model training with a clear product interface for iterative deployment (Codex Chronicle). You will work with researchers, engineers, product teams, infrastructure teams, and safety/alignment partners to decide what should go into major model runs, measure whether it worked, and ship improvements into products used by real people. This is a high-agency role for people who want their work to land directly in frontier models.

Responsibilities

• Design and run experiments that improve scaling of compute on context.
• Own end-to-end improvements to the post-training stack, including RL, data pipelines, graders, reward signals, evals, diagnostics, and model-behavior analysis.
• Build evals and environments that expose the next set of model failures, then turn those failures into training data, product fixes, or new research directions.
• Partner with Codex and ChatGPT product teams to understand what users need and translate product signal into model improvements.
• Work on early-training and alignment interventions, including data mixtures, objectives, synthetic data, and eval loops that shape downstream agent behavior.
• Help decide which integrations, capabilities, and fixes are ready for inclusion in major model runs.
• Improve the machinery for large-scale training and launch: experiment velocity, reliability, observability, reproducibility, cost, latency, and production readiness.
• Take on cross-functional projects that touch model training, product infrastructure, and the production agent harness, such as multi-agent systems or training directly against production-like environments.
• Debug hard failures in shipped or near-shipped models and turn messy qualitative behavior into concrete hypotheses, experiments, and fixes.

Requirements

• Strong technical fundamentals in machine learning, software engineering, systems, statistics, or a related field, and ability to learn quickly across unfamiliar parts.
• Hands-on experience with LLMs, RL, RLHF/RLAIF, post-training, evals, graders, synthetic data, model training, coding agents, tool-using agents, or production ML systems.
• Comfortable with open-ended problems where the path is unclear, signal is noisy, and solutions require both research taste and engineering execution.
• Care about product impact and model behavior (not just benchmarks); ability to define hypotheses, build pipelines, run models, analyze results, and iterate.
• Able to work across research, product, infrastructure, data, evals, and safety boundaries and communicate clearly with each group.
• Willingness to build load-bearing systems and processes when needed.

Compensation Range

$250K - $380K USD

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer and do 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 for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law. OpenAI is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Benefits

• 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/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).