Research Engineer, Codex

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading AI research company in San Francisco seeks a team member to improve the performance and reliability of AI coding models. In this hybrid role, you'll design experiments, collaborate with experts, and develop insights that help users write better code faster. Ideal candidates have strong software engineering skills, a creative approach to problem-solving, and experience in ML systems.

Qualifications

• Excited to explore and push boundaries in software reasoning and code generation.
• Ability to quickly turn ideas into working prototypes.
• Thinks holistically about performance: speed, cost, and user experience.

Responsibilities

• Design and run experiments to improve code generation and reasoning.
• Develop insights into model training, alignment, and evaluation.
• Address inefficiencies in the Codex system stack.

Skills

Strong software engineering skills

Experience with ML systems and cloud infrastructure

Performance optimization

Creativity and rigorous problem-solving

Job description

The Codex team is responsible for building state-of-the-art AI systems that can write code, reason about software, and act as intelligent agents for developers and non-developers alike. Our mission is to push the frontier of code generation and agentic reasoning, and deploy these capabilities in real-world products such as ChatGPT and the API, as well as in next-generation tools specifically designed for agentic coding. We operate across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure—owning the full lifecycle of experimentation, deployment, and iteration on novel coding capabilities.

About the Role

As a member of the Codex team, you will advance the capabilities, performance, and reliability of AI coding models through a combination of research, experimentation, and system optimization. You’ll collaborate with world-class researchers and engineers to develop and deploy systems that help millions of users write better code, faster—while also ensuring these systems are efficient, cost-effective, and production-ready.

We’re looking for people who combine deep curiosity, strong technical fundamentals, and a bias toward impact. Whether your strengths lie in ML research, systems engineering, or performance optimization, you’ll play a pivotal role in pushing the state of the art and bringing these advances into the hands of real users.

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.

In this role, you might:

Design and run experiments to improve code generation, reasoning, and agentic behavior in Codex models.

Develop research insights into model training, alignment, and evaluation.

Hunt down and address inefficiencies across the Codex system stack—from agent behavior to LLM inference to container orchestration—and land high-leverage performance improvements.
Build tooling to measure, profile, and optimize system performance at scale.

Work across the stack to prototype new capabilities, debug complex issues, and ship improvements to production.

You might thrive in this role if you:

Are excited to explore and push the boundaries of large language models, especially in the domain of software reasoning and code generation.

Have strong software engineering skills and enjoy quickly turning ideas into working prototypes.

Think holistically about performance, balancing speed, cost, and user experience.

Bring creativity and rigor to open-ended research problems and thrive in highly iterative, ambiguous environments.

Have experience operating across both ML systems and cloud infrastructure.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form . No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

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

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.