OpenAI
Researcher, Alignment
- Employment type
- Full-time
- Location
- San Francisco
- Published
- Aug 27, 2024
- Last checked
- Oct 26, 2026
About this role
About the Team
The Alignment team at OpenAI is dedicated to ensuring that our AI systems are safe, trustworthy, and consistently aligned with human values, even as they scale in complexity and capability. Our work is at the cutting edge of AI research, focusing on developing methodologies that enable AI to robustly follow human intent across a wide range of scenarios, including those that are adversarial or high-stakes. We concentrate on the most pressing challenges, ensuring our work addresses areas where AI could have the most significant consequences. By focusing on risks that we can quantify and where our efforts can make a tangible difference, we aim to ensure that our models are ready for the complex, real-world environments in which they will be deployed.
The two pillars of our approach are: (1) harnessing improved capabilities into alignment, making sure that our alignment techniques improve, rather than break, as capabilities grow, and (2) centering humans by developing mechanisms and interfaces that enable humans to both express their intent and to effectively supervise and control AIs, even in highly complex situations.
About the Role
As a Research Engineer / Research Scientist on the Alignment team, you will be at the forefront of ensuring that our AI systems consistently follow human intent, even in complex and unpredictable scenarios. Your role will involve designing and implementing scalable solutions that ensure the alignment of AI as their capabilities grow and that integrate human oversight into AI decision-making.
This role is especially well suited for someone who can move from an ambiguous model-behavior question to a concrete experimental setup: formulate the hypothesis, build the evaluation or intervention, run the experiment, analyze the result, and decide what the evidence supports. This role may be based in San Francisco or London, subject to team needs and location approval.
In this role, you will:
We are seeking research engineers and research scientists to help design and implement experiments for alignment research. Responsibilities may include: