Researcher - Frontier Risk Mitigations

About the Team

Models are becoming increasingly capable—moving from tools that assist humans to agents that can plan, execute, and adapt in the real world. Mitigating the frontier risks resulting from these capabilities is paramount to OpenAI’s ability to continue deploying models safely.

The Preparedness team is dedicated to addressing these critical risks. Our work includes:

1. Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems.

2. Mitigation. Keeping misuse and misalignment safeguards, alignment tools, and security measures on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future.

3. Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework, and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets.

This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society.

About the Role

We are seeking exceptional researchers who can push the frontier of safety mitigations. You will help derisk frontier models by developing novel safety mitigations, developing and applying new techniques from domains like interpretability, control, and alignment to ensure the safety of OpenAI’s deployed models. You will play a critical role in defining how a safe AI system should look in the future at OpenAI, making a significant impact on our mission to build and deploy safe AGI.

This role requires strong technical depth and close cross-functional collaboration to ensure our safety mitigations are enforceable, scalable, and effective. We seek researchers who can partner with experts across domains such as misalignment, cybersecurity, and biology in order to develop the best possible end-to-end safety stack.

In this role, you will:

• Work on identifying emerging AI safety risks and new methodologies for exploring and mitigating the impact of such risks

• Build (and then continuously refine) the evaluations that enable us to assess the extent of these risks; this might include working with domain experts (be it internal or external)

• Set research directions and strategies to make our AI systems safer, more aligned, and more robust

• Contribute to the development of “best practices” guidelines for AI safety for OpenAI and across the industry

• Evaluate and design effective red-teaming pipelines to examine the end-to-end robustness of our safety systems, and identify areas for future improvement.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are excited about OpenAI’s mission of building safe, universally beneficial AGI and are aligned with OpenAI’s charter.

• Show enthusiasm for long-term AI safety, and have thought deeply about technical paths to safe AGI.

• Are willing to “get your hands dirty” and apply methods from domains such as interpretability, robustness, alignment, and control to make OpenAI’s models safe.

• Bring 2+ years of experience in the field of AI safety, especially in areas like RLHF, human-AI collaboration, interpretability, or control.

• Hold a Ph.D. or other degree in computer science, machine learning, or a related field.

• Thrive in environments involving large-scale AI systems.

• Possess 4+ years of research engineering experience and proficiency in Python or similar languages.

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.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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