Researcher, Safety Training, National Security

About the Team

The Safety Training research team aims to fundamentally advance our capabilities for precisely implementing safe behavior in AI models, and to leverage these advances to make OpenAI’s deployed models safe and beneficial. This requires a breadth of new ML research to address the growing set of safety challenges as AI becomes more powerful and used in more settings. Key focus areas include how to train nuanced safety behaviors, how to make the model robust to bad actors, how to address privacy and security risks, and how to make the model trustworthy in safety-critical situations.

We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely.

About the Role

We’re seeking a researcher to train and evaluate models for U.S. government use, with a focus on national security applications. You’ll advance safety post-training and robustness, helping models follow nuanced policies while preserving their usefulness and capabilities.

In this role, you will:

• Research and implement methods for safety training, reinforcement learning, and adversarial robustness.

• Develop evaluations, identify model failure modes, and use findings to improve training.

• Work with research, engineering, security, and policy partners to support safe, reliable deployment.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Bring 4+ years of relevant AI safety research experience, including RLHF, adversarial training, or robustness.

• Have a degree in computer science, machine learning, or a related field, and strong deep learning research or engineering skills.

• Have experience improving model safety for deployment and enjoy collaborative research.

• Are motivated by OpenAI’s mission and the responsible use of AI in safety-critical settings.

Security Requirements

• Active TS/SCI clearance or equivalent.

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 Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

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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