Research Scientist: AI for Human Flourishing

Warmada; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI seeks an exceptional, hands‑on researcher to turn difficult signals of long‑term flourishing into measurable improvements in model behavior. You’ll help set research direction, build what is needed to test your ideas, and drive successful work into the models and products we ship.

We’re especially interested in researchers with deep experience in pretraining or RL/post‑training, or those who combine strong LLM skills with domain expertise in education or mental health.

Responsibilities

• Develop scalable training methods across the training stack that improve how models understand people’s values, support their agency, and help them achieve long‑term goals.
• Lead high‑leverage research from an open question to a shipped improvement: choose a hard‑to‑define problem, iteratively define success, run experiments, and integrate into frontier models.
• Build RL environments for difficult‑to‑verify outcomes, and study whether beneficial behavior generalizes across settings.
• Create evaluations grounded in human expertise and feedback that reveal capability gaps, unintended incentives in RL, and failures that aggregate scores can miss.
• Test whether measures of model behavior predict better learning, wellbeing, and other long‑term outcomes, and use those findings to guide training.
• Build new 0→1 capabilities in human domains that may have an increasing impact with upcoming increases in model intelligence and test‑time compute.
• Partner with product teams, engineers, partnerships teams, and domain experts to deploy promising methods, measure their effects in real use, and turn what you learn into further improvements.
• Assess AI’s impacts on human flourishing at the scale of over a billion users.

Job description

OpenAI seeks an exceptional, hands‑on researcher to turn difficult signals of long‑term flourishing into measurable improvements in model behavior. You’ll help set research direction, build what is needed to test your ideas, and drive successful work into the models and products we ship.

We’re especially interested in researchers with deep experience in pretraining or RL/post‑training, or those who combine strong LLM skills with domain expertise in education or mental health.