Research Engineer/Scientist, Strategic Deployment

About the Team

The Strategic Deployment team makes frontier models more capable, reliable, and aligned to transform high-impact domains. On one hand, this involves deploying models in real-world, high-stakes settings to drive AI-driven transformation and elicit insights—training data, evaluation methods, and techniques—to shape our frontier model development. On the other hand, we leverage these learning to build the science and engineering of impactful frontier model deployment.

Put differently, we want to understand: if AGI is viewed as AI being able to majorly transform our economy, how close are we to AGI? What’s still missing? How do we bridge these gaps?

About the Role

As a Research Engineer/Research Scientist on the Strategic Deployment team, you’ll tackle fundamental research questions and AI engineering challenges grounded in real-world deployment. Your work will build the science and engineering of reliable customization of frontier models and develop understanding and evaluations that fuel both strategically-important AI deployments and guide OpenAI’s frontier model program.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We follow a hybrid model (3 days/week in-office) and offer relocation support.

In this role, you will:

• Conduct research on real-world-informed model generalization, robustness, and steerability.

• Design challenging evaluations that capture real-world utility and reveal frontier model capability gaps.

• Use real deployments as a way to generate learnings to guide OpenAI’s frontier model program.

• Collaborate with other researchers, infrastructure teams, and in some cases, domain experts and/or partners in strategic industries to surface major impact opportunities.

You might thrive in this role if you: 

• Have a research background in ML, deep learning, or related areas (e.g., RL, evaluation science, robustness).

• Have strong engineering skills and are comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug and improve it.

• Are interested in foundational research informed by real-world deployment—not just paper benchmarks.

• Are excited by ambiguous, open-ended problem spaces with high impact and stakes.

• Enjoy building tools, datasets, or infrastructure to elicit deeper insight.

• Want to shape how frontier models evolve toward AGI.

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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. 

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For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.