Researcher, Preparedness

Details

About the Team

The Preparedness team is an important part of the Safety Systems org at OpenAI, and is guided by OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework.

Frontier AI models have the potential to benefit all of humanity, but also pose increasingly severe risks. To ensure that AI promotes positive change, the Preparedness team helps us prepare for the development of increasingly capable frontier AI models. This team is tasked with identifying, tracking, and preparing for catastrophic risks related to frontier AI models.

The mission of the Preparedness team is to:

• Closely monitor and predict the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems, with an eye towards misuse risks whose impact could be catastrophic to our society
• Ensure we have concrete procedures, infrastructure and partnerships to mitigate these risks and to safely handle the development of powerful AI systems

Preparedness tightly connects capability assessment, evaluations, and internal red teaming, and mitigations for frontier models, as well as overall coordination on AGI preparedness. This is fast paced, exciting work that has far reaching importance for the company and for society.

About the Role

We are looking to hire exceptional research engineers that can push the boundaries of our frontier models. Specifically, we are looking for those that will help us shape our empirical grasp of the whole spectrum of AI safety concerns and will own individual threads within this endeavor end-to-end.

You will own the scientific validity of our frontier preparedness capability evaluations—designing new evals grounded in real threat models (including high-consequence domains like CBRN as well as cyber and other frontier-risk areas), and maintaining existing evals so they don’t stale or silently regress. You’ll define datasets, graders, rubrics, and threshold guidance, and produce auditable artifacts (evaluation cards, capability reports, system-card inputs) that leadership can trust during high-stakes launches.

Responsibilities

• Work on identifying emerging AI safety risks and new methodologies for exploring the impact of these risks
• Build (and then continuously refine) evaluations of frontier AI models that assess the extent of identified risks
• Design and build scalable systems and processes that can support these kinds of evaluations
• Contribute to the refinement of risk management and the overall development of "best practice" guidelines for AI safety evaluations

Requirements

• Passionate and knowledgeable about short-term and long-term AI safety risks
• Ability to think creatively and possess a robust "red-teaming mindset"
• Experience in ML research engineering, ML observability and monitoring, creating large language model–enabled applications, and/or another technical domain applicable to AI risk
• Able to operate effectively in a dynamic and extremely fast-paced research environment as well as scope and deliver projects end-to-end

Preferred (It would be great if you also have)

• First-hand experience in red-teaming systems—be it computer systems or otherwise
• A good understanding of the (nuances of) societal aspects of AI deployment
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work cross-functionally

Export-control restriction

This role may require access to technology or technical data controlled under the U.S. Export Administration Regulations or International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Therefore, this role is restricted to individuals described in paragraph (a)(1) of the definition of “U.S. person” in the U.S. Export Administration Regulations, 15 C.F.R. § 772.1, and in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, 22 C.F.R. § 120.62. U.S. persons are U.S. citizens, U.S. legal permanent residents, individuals granted asylum status in the United States, and individuals admitted to the United States as refugees.

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 we 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.

Compensation and Benefits

• Estimated base salary: $310,000 – $460,000
• Base pay may vary depending on market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. Total compensation may also include equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• 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
• Paid time off (flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees)
• 13+ paid company holidays and additional paid company 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)

Other notes

Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law. OpenAI is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities; requests can be made via the provided link.