Research Engineer, Frontier Evals & Environments

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

Job summary

A leading AI research organization in San Francisco is seeking a Research Engineer focused on pushing the boundaries of frontier models and AGI/ASI measurement. Candidates should have strong engineering and statistical skills, a red-teaming mindset, and the ability to thrive in a fast-paced research environment. This role offers the opportunity to shape innovative AI measurements and build evaluation environments that drive progress.

Qualifications

• Passionate about AGI/ASI measurement.
• Strong engineering and statistical analysis skills.
• Able to operate in a dynamic research environment.

Responsibilities

• Create ambitious RL environments to push models to limits.
• Work on measuring frontier model capabilities, skills, and behaviors.
• Develop methodologies for exploring model behavior.
• Steer training for large runs and observe future potential.
• Design systems for continuous evaluation.
• Build self-improvement loops for model understanding.

Skills

AGI/ASI measurement

Engineering skills

Statistical analysis

Red-teaming mindset

ML research engineering

Job description

About the team

The Frontier Evals & Environments team builds north star model environments to drive progress towards safe AGI/ASI. This team builds ambitious environments to measure and steer our models, and creates self‑improvement loops to steer our training, safety, and launch decisions. Some of the team's open‑sourced evaluations include GDPval, SWE‑bench Verified, MLE‑bench, PaperBench, and SWE‑Lancer, and the team built and ran frontier evaluations for GPT4o, o1, o3, GPT 4.5, ChatGPT Agent, and GPT5. If you are interested in feeling firsthand the fast progress of our models, and steering them towards good, this is the team for you.

About you

We seek exceptional research engineers that can push the boundaries of our frontier models. Specifically, we are looking for those that will help us shape our empirical grasp of the whole spectrum of AI capabilities measurement and will own individual threads within this endeavor end‑to‑end.

In this role, you'll:

• Create ambitious RL environments to push our models to their limits
• Work on measuring frontier model capabilities, skills, and behaviors
• Develop new methodologies for automatically exploring the behavior of these models
• Help steer training for our largest training runs, and see the future first
• Design scalable systems and processes to support continuous evaluation
• Build self‑improvement loops to automate model understanding

We expect you to be:

• Passionate and knowledgeable about AGI/ASI measurement
• Strong engineering and statistical analysis skills
• Able to think outside the box and have a robust “red‑team‑ing mindset”
• Experienced in ML research engineering, stochastic systems, observability and monitoring, LLM‑enabled applications, and/or another technical domain applicable to AI evaluations
• Able to operate effectively in a dynamic and extremely fast‑paced research environment as well as scope and deliver projects end‑to‑end

It would be great if you also have:

• First‑hand experience in red‑team‑ing systems—be it computer systems or otherwise
• An ability to work cross‑functionally
• Excellent communication skills

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.

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