Software Engineer, AI Safety

Details

The Safety Systems team is dedicated to ensuring the safety, robustness, and reliability of AI models and their deployment in the real world. Building on many years of practical alignment work and applied safety efforts, Safety Systems addresses emerging safety issues and develops new fundamental solutions to enable the safe deployment of our most advanced models and future AGI, to make AI that is beneficial and trustworthy.

About the Role

At OpenAI, we're dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence, and we know that creating a secure and reliable platform is vital to our mission. We're seeking a software engineer to help build out trust and safety capabilities. In this role you'll design and implement systems that detect and prevent abuse, promote user safety, and reduce risk across the platform. You'll work across engineering and research teams to ensure AI is harnessed responsibly and sustainably.

Responsibilities

• Architect, build, and maintain anti-abuse and content moderation infrastructure designed to protect the company and end users from unwanted behavior.
• Work closely with engineers and researchers to utilize both industry-standard and novel AI techniques to measure, monitor, and improve AI models' alignment to human values.
• Diagnose and remediate active incidents on the platform and build tooling and infrastructure that address root causes of system failures.
• Deploy classifiers or machine learning models and work on modern ML infrastructure, monitoring, and incident response for production services.

Requirements

• Experience building and running production services in a high-growth, rapidly scaling environment.
• Ability to debug live issues and restore systems quickly; experience with incident diagnosis and remediation.
• Experience or strong interest in content safety, fraud, or abuse, and present-day ("now-term") AI safety work.
• Experience with Python or modern languages such as C++, Rust, or Go; ability to ramp up quickly on Python.
• Understanding of trade-offs between model capabilities and risks, and ability to navigate them to deploy features safely.
• Strong project management skills; self-directed and able to remove roadblocks and drive projects to completion with minimal guidance.
• Experience deploying classifiers or ML models, or strong interest in learning ML infrastructure.

Tech Stack

• Terraform, Kubernetes, Azure, Python, Postgres, Kafka. (OpenAI values experience with these technologies but prioritizes engineers with strong technical skills and fast learning ability.)

Benefits

• Base pay range listed for this role: $210K – $325K (offers equity). Total compensation also includes equity and potential 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, paid medical and 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 multiple coordinated office closures, plus 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 meal delivery credits as eligible.
• Relocation support for eligible employees.
• Additional taxable fringe benefits such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends may be provided.

Additional Notes

• OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities. Background checks will be administered in accordance with applicable law. More information about OpenAI's safety approach and policies is linked from the job posting.