Software Engineer, Front-end/UX - job 1 of 2

San Francisco, California, United States

About the team

The Policy Research team at OpenAI is responsible for understanding our company's current and potential impact on the world, and using that understanding to recommend the best possible policies at OpenAI and elsewhere (“policies” are defined broadly to include laws, safety requirements, industry norms, etc.). Team members have backgrounds in a wide variety of disciplines, including computer science and engineering, law, philosophy, economics, political science, and more, and we use a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative methods to measure, forecast, and analyze OpenAI's impacts.

About the role

We are looking for a software engineer highly skilled in front-end and UX to build out and improve the technical tools we use to build out mitigations in our public-facing interfaces in close collaboration with our Product and Design teams. We’re particularly interested in improving the sociotechnical tools we use to evaluate the effectiveness of mitigations that inform users what an AI system can and cannot be trusted to do safely and robustly.

This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role you will:

• Design and implement new ways of interacting with AI models and systems
• Collect and analyze qualitative and quantitative data on how humans (including OpenAI users and customers) understand the capabilities of AI systems.
• Research best practices on how humans develop trust in AI systems and oversee systems’ decision-making. 
• Collaborate with our product safety and policy teams: help make decisions on how our model should behave and what data we need to collect to achieve this, engage with literature on eliciting preferences and distill the findings into something we can engineer.
• Translate evals on what our models can and cannot do into meaningful messaging for users.
• Collaborate with our design team to ensure that we are collecting useful data to understand the efficacy of existing mitigations and work together to ensure recommendations from the research team can be integrated with the user interface in line with the products’ larger design philosophy. 

This role may be a fit if you:

• Have experience with web app technologies (HTTP servers, databases, javascript/typescript, React, etc.) and experience iterating quickly and writing production-quality code.
• Enjoy making great user experiences (e.g., making reactive websites, hacking on browser extensions, talking to users).
• Care deeply about designing healthy and collaborative interactions between humans and intelligent machines.
• Have strong communication skills and are excited to collaborate across multiple teams.

Nice to have:

• Research experience designing experiments with human subjects.
• Interest or existing knowledge of the literature on over-/under-reliance on AI systems, including HCI and human interactions with AI systems.
• Experience using and coding with large language models.

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. 

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.

Compensation, Benefits and Perks

The annual salary range for this role is $200,000 – $370,000. Total compensation also includes generous equity and benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family
• Mental health and wellness support
• 401(k) plan with 4% matching
• Unlimited time off and 18+ company holidays per year
• Paid parental leave (20 weeks) and family-planning support
• Annual learning & development stipend ($1,500 per year)

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

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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