Research Scientist / Research Engineer - Foundations, Search

About this role

About the Team

The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models. Pushing the boundaries of data, scaling laws, optimization techniques, model architectures, and efficiency improvements to propel our science.

The Search team sits within Foundations, building agentic search by co-designing model–system interfaces with the core search stack (serving, indexing, retrieval) to translate model intent into reliable, real-world actions. Operating at the frontier of AI and information retrieval, the team develops large-scale systems that transform and index vast corpora, enabling models to reason over global knowledge and act dependably. In close partnership with researchers, we rapidly bring modeling breakthroughs into production and redefine how intelligent systems discover, retrieve, and synthesize information at planetary scale.

About the Role

We’re looking for a researcher focused on our search efforts. You’ll work with a a team of world-class research scientists and engineers developing foundational technology that enables models to retrieve and condition on the right information, at the right time. This includes designing new embedding training objectives, scalable vector store architectures, and dynamic indexing methods.

This work will support retrieval across many OpenAI products and internal research efforts, with opportunities for scientific publication and deep technical impact.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

Responsibilities

• Tackle embedding models and retrieval systems optimized for grounding, relevance, and adaptive reasoning.

• Collaborate with a team of researchers and engineers building end-to-end infrastructure for training, evaluating, and integrating embeddings into frontier models.