Research Engineer - Beneficial AI for Human Flourishing

OpenAI, Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI’s Human Flourishing team seeks a hands-on researcher to transform signals of long-term flourishing into measurable improvements in model behavior. You will help set direction, build what’s needed to test ideas, and drive successful work into models and products shipped by OpenAI.

You will be especially focused on improving frontier models through pretraining or RL/post-training, with potential work in education or mental health domains.

Qualifications

• Strong research record in pretraining or RL/post-training for frontier models.
• Hands-on coder with ability to write and debug code and work with training infrastructure.
• Ability to work across disciplines and identify bottlenecks to scale impact.

Responsibilities

• Develop scalable training methods across the training stack to align models with human values and long-term goals.
• Lead high-leverage research from question to shipped improvement with measurable impact.
• Build RL environments for difficult-to-verify outcomes and study generalization across settings.
• Create evaluations rooted in human expertise to reveal capability gaps and unintended incentives in RL.
• Test whether model behavior correlates with better learning and well-being outcomes to guide training.
• Develop new 0→1 capabilities in human domains as models advance.
• Collaborate with product, engineering, partnerships, and domain experts to deploy methods and measure real-world impact.
• Assess AI's impacts on human flourishing at scale (over a billion users).

Job description

OpenAI’s Human Flourishing team seeks a hands-on researcher to transform signals of long-term flourishing into measurable improvements in model behavior. You will help set direction, build what’s needed to test ideas, and drive successful work into models and products shipped by OpenAI.

You will be especially focused on improving frontier models through pretraining or RL/post-training, with potential work in education or mental health domains.