Researcher, Agent Safety, Training and Evaluations

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 380,000 - 500,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI in San Francisco is seeking a role on the Agent Safety team to ensure frontier AI agents act safely and align with user intent. We welcome researchers and engineers who want to contribute to safety and alignment, even if coming from different backgrounds.

The role focuses on training and evaluating frontier models, building scalable evaluation and measurement systems, and collaborating with cross-team partners to ship mitigations into large-scale training.

Qualifications

• Have demonstrated strength in research engineering, ML engineering, quantitative research, or applied model research, with the ability to own ambiguous projects end to end.
• Bring excellent technical execution across experimentation, data, evaluation, and/or infrastructure, plus strong intuition for modern frontier-model research.
• Are motivated by agent safety and eager to work on urgent, practical problems even if your prior work was outside safety or alignment.

Responsibilities

• Train and evaluate frontier models to reduce harmful or misaligned agent actions, forming clear hypotheses and executing independently through ambiguity.
• Mine incidents and build scalable measurement, data-processing, and evaluation systems that turn real failures into repeatable safety signals.
• Collaborate closely with post-training, capabilities, oversight, and pre-training partners to ship research-backed mitigations into large-scale training and agent systems.

Job description

About The Team

The Agent Safety team works to ensure that increasingly capable AI agents act safely, exercise sound judgment, and remain aligned with user intent. Our mission is to reduce the probability of severe unintended outcomes from increasingly capable AI agents while preserving their ability to act effectively and autonomously.

About The Team

The Agent Safety team works to ensure that increasingly capable AI agents act safely, exercise sound judgment, and remain aligned with user intent. Our mission is to reduce the probability of severe unintended outcomes from increasingly capable AI agents while preserving their ability to act effectively and autonomously.

Our Work Spans Three Areas

• Training: Create training methods, environments and data that teach agents to make better decisions in consequential situations. We turn real-world failures into training signals that prevent similar incidents, and identify precursor behaviors and mitigations to address emerging risks.
• Measurements: Build evaluations and production metrics that identify emerging risks and measure whether our interventions work.
• Oversight: Develop oversight and system mitigation mechanisms that reduce harmful actions while preserving useful autonomy (for example future versions of auto-review).

About The Role

We’re looking for strong executors with excellent judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and an understanding of frontier model research. You don’t need prior safety or alignment experience, we also welcome people that recently realized that alignment and safety is a critical area to contribute to.

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 Will

• Train and evaluate frontier models to reduce harmful or misaligned agent actions, forming clear hypotheses and executing independently through ambiguity.
• Mine incidents and build scalable measurement, data-processing, and evaluation systems that turn real failures into repeatable safety signals.
• Collaborate closely with post-training, capabilities, oversight, and pre-training partners to ship research-backed mitigations into large-scale training and agent systems.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Have demonstrated strength in research engineering, ML engineering, quantitative research, or applied model research, with the ability to own ambiguous projects end to end.
• Bring excellent technical execution across experimentation, data, evaluation, and/or infrastructure, plus strong intuition for modern frontier-model research.
• Are motivated by agent safety and eager to work on urgent, practical problems even if your prior work was outside safety or alignment.

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.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Aff... (text truncated in prompt but included).

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. 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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Compensation Range: $380K - $500K