← All roles

Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Health

OpenAI· Research
Apply on company site
San Francisco$295k - $555kFull-timePosted 2mo ago

About the role

Hands-on researcher to build frontier health capabilities and drive measurable impact in health-related AI at OpenAI, focusing on pretraining, RL/post-training, evals, and health-specific capabilities; role combines research leadership with practical implementation to improve health reasoning, reliability, and real-world outcomes.

Responsibilities

  • Own a high-leverage research direction end to end—from deciding which problem matters and how to measure it, to designing and running experiments, to integrating successful work into frontier models.
  • Develop scalable methods across pretraining, midtraining, reinforcement learning, and post-training to improve health reasoning, knowledge, reliability, calibration, and behavior.
  • Build and study RL environments grounded in real health problems; understand which data and training setups produce robust, generalizable improvements rather than just higher benchmark scores.
  • Create meaningful, trustworthy, and unsaturated evaluations that tell us whether our models are actually getting better at what matters for patients and clinicians.
  • Advance new 0→1 capabilities in health that may have an increasing impact with upcoming increases in model intelligence and test-time compute.
  • Develop models and agents that can work over longitudinal, multimodal health data to produce useful predictions, surface new scientific insights, and support better individual- and population-level decisions.
  • Work closely with researchers, engineers, clinicians, and product teams to bring health capabilities into the models and products used by hundreds of millions of people.
  • Help establish that AI improves real health outcomes, not just that it can produce impressive answers or demos.

Qualifications

  • Care deeply about using increasingly capable AI to improve human health, and take seriously the responsibility of deploying it safely.
  • Have an unusually strong track record in machine learning or AI research, with the depth to push at least one important area forward: pretraining, reinforcement learning / post-training, evals (not necessarily specific to health); or substantial depth in a relevant frontier health / biomedical AI problem.
  • Are a hands-on builder: you can design experiments, write and debug code, work directly with data and training infrastructure, and move quickly from an idea to evidence.
  • Have strong research taste and can distinguish an important problem or a promising approach from an interesting one.
  • Own ambiguous problems end to end, and are willing to learn whatever is missing to get the job done.
  • Stay goal-oriented rather than method-oriented, and don’t shy away from unglamorous work if it is the highest-leverage path to impact.
  • Care about whether a capability will scale, generalize, and make it into the real world—not just whether it can be shown in a paper or prototype.
  • Enjoy working with low-ego, ambitious people across research, engineering, medicine, and product.
  • Bonus: Experience with health AI, longitudinal health data, or clinical research.

Skills

Required:Research leadership and directionPretraining, RL/post-training, evalsExperiment design and code implementationEvaluation and validationCross-functional collaboration
Nice to have:Health data handling

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 Sep 3, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.

About OpenAI

ai-infrastructure-and-developmentliquid-ai-recruiting-targetllmsetter-30setter-30-2026-q1speech-to-texttext-to-speechvoice-ai-stack
Company profileWebsite

More open roles at OpenAI