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Research Scientist / Research Engineer - Foundations, Search

OpenAI· Research
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San Francisco$380k - $850kFull-timePosted 11mo ago

About the role

Research-focused role within OpenAI's Foundations and Search teams, developing embedding, retrieval, and memory-enabled foundations technology to support model grounding and real-world actions. Hybrid in San Francisco with relocation support.

Responsibilities

  • Tackle embedding models and retrieval systems optimized for grounding, relevance, and adaptive reasoning.
  • Collaborate with researchers and engineers to build end-to-end infrastructure for training, evaluating, and integrating embeddings into frontier models.
  • Drive innovation in dense, sparse, and hybrid representation techniques, metric learning, and learning-to-retrieve systems.
  • Collaborate closely with Pretraining, Inference, and other Research teams to integrate retrieval throughout the model lifecycle.
  • Contribute to OpenAI’s long-term vision of AI systems with memory and knowledge access capabilities rooted in learned representations.

Qualifications

  • Proven experience leading high-performance teams of researchers or engineers in ML infrastructure or foundational research.
  • Deep technical expertise in representation learning, embedding models, or vector retrieval systems.
  • Familiarity with transformer-based LLMs and how embedding spaces can interact with language model objectives.
  • Research experience in contrastive learning, supervised or unsupervised embedding learning, or metric learning.
  • Track record of building or scaling large machine learning systems, particularly embedding pipelines in production or research contexts.
  • First-principles mindset for challenging assumptions about how retrieval and memory should work for large models.

Skills

Required:Representation learningEmbedding modelsVector retrieval systems
Nice to have:Transformer-based LLMsMachine learning system scalingResearch leadership

Benefits

  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
  • Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
  • 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
  • Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
  • Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
  • 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time
  • Mental health and wellness support
  • Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
  • Annual learning and development stipend
  • Daily meals in offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
  • Relocation support for eligible employees
  • Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends
Last updated Oct 22, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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