Research Engineer

About the team

OpenAI’s Human Data Team creates custom data solutions driving groundbreaking research. Our work enhances and evaluates our flagship models and products like ChatGPT, GPT-4o, and Sora, and contributes to safety initiatives through collaboration with our Preparedness and Safety Systems teams.

We work with AI trainers to gather specialized data for training and evaluating our models across modalities such as video, audio, text, and tool actions. Our goal is to develop scalable methods and tools and platforms to generate and evaluate high quality data from both synthetic sources and human experts in various fields, including mathematics, sciences, creative writing, programming, art, and safety. We leverage OpenAI models to improve and streamline our data collection and quality processes.

We’re looking for individuals with strong ML engineering skills, research experience, and a deep understanding of Human-Machine Interaction challenges, especially with novel and highly capable models.

About you

We are looking for a research engineer to help us empirically evaluate model performance across capabilities and modalities and develop our human evaluation methodologies.

In this role, you will:

• Design, execute, and analyze evaluations of frontier AI models that assess capabilities and safety.

• Write clean non-ML code, for example when building interfaces to our trainers interact with our models or pipelines for managing human data.

• Collaborate closely with a small team to balance the need for flexibility and iteration speed in research with the need for stability and reliability in a complex long-lived project.

• Curate large datasets of prompts and investigate coverage of boundary cases

• Measure the effectiveness of evaluation techniques

• Build infrastructure, systems and processes that can support these kinds of evaluations, and scalably track their results

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

We expect you to be:

• Able to operate effectively in a dynamic and extremely fast-paced research environment as well as scope and deliver projects end-to-end

• Willing to wear many hats

• Hold a B.S. or other degree in computer science, AI, machine learning, or a related field.

• Experienced in Python.

• Familiar with frontend technologies such as JS/Typescript (or excited to learn)

• Goal-oriented instead of method-oriented, and not afraid of tedious but high-value work when needed.

• Strongly motivated by OpenAI’s mission of building safe, universally beneficial AGI and are aligned with OpenAI’s charter

Nice to have

• Bonus: Data visualization and statistics experience

• Bonus: An ability to work cross-functionally

• Bonus:A background in HCI, cognitive science, or psychology

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, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. 

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For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.