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Research Engineer / Research Scientist / AI Systems Engineer, RSI

OpenAI· Research
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Hybrid (San Francisco)$295k - $445k + equity + bonusFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Role focusing on automating research at OpenAI within the Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) team; responsibilities span designing evaluations, building data-driven workflows, improving research capabilities, and developing research agents and infrastructure to accelerate and ensure quality research and safe deployments.

Responsibilities

  • Design evaluations for research judgment, hypothesis generation and testing, and long-horizon experiment execution.
  • Turn real research workflows and model failures into data and evaluation flywheels.
  • Improve model research capabilities through agent harnesses, synthetic data, RL environments, and model training.
  • Build and maintain safe, reliable integrations between our models and OpenAI’s research infrastructure.
  • Develop research agents, experiment-orchestration systems, and sandboxed runtimes that support real research workflows.
  • Create metrics and economic models to understand RSI’s current and future effects on research productivity, model capabilities, and the safety of internal deployments.

Qualifications

  • Have research or engineering experience across LLM training, model evaluations, agent systems, synthetic data, research infrastructure, or large-scale distributed systems.
  • Are a strong generalist who can move between open-ended research and practical implementation, turning ambiguous problems into clear results.
  • Collaborate effectively across the full stack, including systems, data, model training, evaluations, and other research teams.
  • Are comfortable building and maintaining the data pipelines, tooling, and infrastructure needed to support emerging AI capabilities.
  • Are comfortable working on problems without clear definitions or established playbooks.
  • Think rigorously about scientific quality, research taste, safety, privacy, reliability, performance, and scale.
  • Are excited about using increasingly capable AI systems to accelerate meaningful research.

Skills

Required:LLM trainingmodel evaluationsagent systemsresearch infrastructure
Nice to have:synthetic data

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 to fuel your professional growth
  • Daily meals in our 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 Aug 6, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

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Company profileWebsite

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