Research Engineer, OpenAI
Superalignment
$245-450k
Total compensation also includes generous equity
AI research and development platform
Job no longer available
AI research and development platform
1001+ employees
Job no longer available
$245-450k
Total compensation also includes generous equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Role
Who you are
- Possess a strong curiosity about aligning and understanding ML models, and are motivated to use your career to address this challenge
- Enjoy fast-paced, collaborative, and cutting-edge research environments
- Have experience implementing ML algorithms (e.g., PyTorch)
- Can develop data visualization or data collection interfaces (e.g., JavaScript, Python)
- Want to ensure that powerful AI systems stay under human control
What the job involves
- Writing performant and clean code for ML training
- Independently running and analyzing ML experiments to diagnose problems and understand which changes are real improvements
- Writing clean non-ML code, for example when building interfaces to let workers interact with our models or pipelines for managing human data
- Collaborating 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
- Understanding our high-level research roadmap to help plan and prioritize future experiments
- Implement experiments to measure the effectiveness of scalable oversight techniques such as AI-assisted feedback and Debate
- Studying generalization to see when AI systems trained on easy problem can solve hard problems
- Managing large datasets from interpretability experiments and creating visualizations to explore interpretability data
- Investigating situations when training against a reward signal causes model outputs to deteriorate
- Exploring methods to understand and predict model behaviors, such as finding inputs causing anomalous circuits or catastrophic outputs
- Designing novel approaches for using LLMs in alignment research
Our take
OpenAI aims to research and deploy AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that is safe, controllable and beneficial to all of humanity. The company began its mission by developing an API that can solve language-based tasks, such as answering written questions or pulling up relevant documents based on a query.
Following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, which gained more than 1 million users in its first 5 days and is already worth billions, OpenAI announced a paid version named ChatGPT Plus which will be launched in the US first.
It is worth noting that OpenAI is not without controversy. Its products have sparked conversations regarding the morals and implications of AI tools, and recent investigations have uncovered misalignments between the company's public commitments and its alleged operations behind closed doors.
Whilst AI applications can be found in a vast variety of tech startups, this generally consists of the automation of algorithmic tasks such as data analysis and organization. OpenAI’s approach to designing true human-like artificial intelligence is futuristic, but with support from its high-profile partners (such as Microsoft), an annualised revenue reported at $ 2 billion in 2023, and the clear success of its products have the company well set to continue bringing advanced AI to the public.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
42% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 10 rounds)
Mar 2026
$122bn
LATE VC
Dec 2025
$1bn
LATE VC
Total funding: $191.9bn
Company benefits
- Health/Dental/Vision Insurance
- Flexible spending account for healthcare and dependent care
- Mental healthcare service
- Fertility treatment coverage
- 401(k) with generous matching
- 20-week paid parental leave
- Life insurance (complimentary)
- AD&D insurance (complimentary)
- Short-term/long-term disability insurance (complimentary)
- Optional buy-up life insurance
- Flexible work hours and unlimited paid time off (we encourage 4+ weeks per year)
- Annual learning & development stipend
- Regular team happy hours and outings
- Daily catered lunch and dinner
- Travel to domestic conferences
Company HQ
Mission District, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Sam Altman
(CEO)Former Y Combinator President & Chairman.
Ilya Sutskever
(Chief Scientist)Initially served as the company's Research Director, then became Chief Scientist in 2018. Co-founded DNNResearch and previously worked at Google as a Research Scientist.
Greg Brockman
(President & Chairman)Previously served as CTO of the company. Founding Engineer and former CTO of Stripe.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job