Research Engineer/Scientist, Strategic Deployment

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 295,000 - 440,000; Full time

Job summary

An innovative firm is seeking a Research Engineer/Scientist to join their Strategic Deployment team in San Francisco. This role focuses on addressing fundamental research questions and engineering challenges related to the real-world deployment of frontier models. You will engage in impactful research that informs the customization of AI models, collaborate with diverse teams, and contribute to the evolution of AI towards general intelligence. If you are passionate about shaping the future of AI and thrive in high-stakes environments, this opportunity is perfect for you.

Benefits

Relocation support

Equity offers

Flexible work hours

Health benefits

Professional development opportunities

Qualifications

• Strong research background in ML and deep learning.
• Experience with real-world deployments and model evaluation.

Responsibilities

• Conduct research on model generalization and robustness.
• Design evaluations to capture real-world utility.

Skills

Machine Learning

Deep Learning

Robustness

Reinforcement Learning

Evaluation Science

Education

PhD in Machine Learning or related field

Master's in Computer Science or related area

Tools

Python

TensorFlow

PyTorch

Job description

Research Engineer/Scientist, Strategic Deployment | OpenAI | OpenAI

Research Engineer/Scientist, Strategic Deployment

Research - San Francisco

About the Team

The Strategic Deployment team makes frontier models more capable, reliable, and aligned to transform high-impact domains. This involves deploying models in real-world, high-stakes settings to drive AI-driven transformation and elicit insights—training data, evaluation methods, and techniques—to shape our frontier model development. We want to understand: if AGI is viewed as AI being able to majorly transform our economy, how close are we to AGI? What’s still missing? How do we bridge these gaps?

About the Role

As a Research Engineer/Research Scientist on the Strategic Deployment team, you’ll tackle fundamental research questions and AI engineering challenges grounded in real-world deployment. Your work will build the science and engineering of reliable customization of frontier models and develop understanding and evaluations that fuel both strategically-important AI deployments and guide OpenAI’s frontier model program.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We follow a hybrid model (3 days/week in-office) and offer relocation support.

In this role, you will:

1. Conduct research on real-world-informed model generalization, robustness, and steerability.
2. Design challenging evaluations that capture real-world utility and reveal frontier model capability gaps.
3. Use real deployments as a way to generate learnings to guide OpenAI’s frontier model program.
4. Collaborate with other researchers, infrastructure teams, and in some cases, domain experts and/or partners in strategic industries to surface major impact opportunities.

You might thrive in this role if you:

1. Have a research background in ML, deep learning, or related areas (e.g., RL, evaluation science, robustness).
2. Have strong engineering skills and are comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug and improve it.
3. Are interested in foundational research informed by real-world deployment—not just paper benchmarks.
4. Are excited by ambiguous, open-ended problem spaces with high impact and stakes.
5. Enjoy building tools, datasets, or infrastructure to elicit deeper insight.
6. Want to shape how frontier models evolve toward AGI.

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.

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.

Compensation

$295K – $440K + Offers Equity