Researcher, Multimodal Safety

Details

OpenAI's Chat and Multimodal Safety team develops research, training methods, and evaluations to ensure that multimodal models and products behave safely across text, speech, and visual experiences. The team works closely with Personal AGI, Consumer Devices, model training, and product teams.

The role focuses on shaping how frontier models perceive and reason about the world and translating that understanding into safe behavior. Strong candidates combine deep technical expertise with safety judgment and may have experience building vision-language models, working on modality fusion or image encoders, developing multimodal post-training or evaluations, or advancing safety for image, video, or audio systems.

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

Responsibilities

• Define and advance multimodal safety research for text, vision, and audio, connecting perception and semantic understanding to safe model behavior.
• Build training and evaluation methods for vision-language models, including post-training, safety evaluations, and interventions that help models respond safely and appropriately in varied contexts.
• Collaborate closely with Personal AGI, Consumer Devices, and product and model teams to translate research into safer ambient, embedded, and personalized multimodal experiences.

Requirements

• A track record of building or advancing multimodal models, with depth in vision-language models, video understanding, image generation, audio, or multimodal reasoning, and fluency across perception and language.
• Understanding of multimodal systems end to end, including encoders, projection layers, modality fusion, cross-modal reasoning, scaling, and inference tradeoffs.
• Experience improving frontier model behavior through post-training approaches such as supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, data curation, synthetic data, evaluation, and rigorous error analysis.
• Strong research and engineering judgment for open-ended safety problems, including forming testable hypotheses, designing experiments and evaluations, diagnosing model failures, and translating findings into robust improvements.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The company develops AI systems and seeks to deploy them safely through its products.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks are administered in accordance with applicable law.

Compensation and Benefits

• Base salary: $295,000–$445,000 per year.
• Equity, performance-related bonuses for eligible employees, and comprehensive benefits.
• 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, paid company holidays, office closures, and 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 eligible meal delivery credits.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.