Lead Research Engineer / Scientist, Chemical & Biological Risk jobs in United States
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OpenAI · 3 months ago

Lead Research Engineer / Scientist, Chemical & Biological Risk

positionSan Francisco
timeFull-time
remoteOnsite
senioritySenior Level, Lead/Staff
money$460K/yr - $460K/yr

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They are seeking a Lead Research Engineer / Scientist for chemical and biological risks to design and implement a mitigation strategy to prevent misuse across OpenAI’s products, ensuring safety and scalability.

Agentic AIArtificial Intelligence (AI)Foundational AIGenerative AIMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingSaaS
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Growth Opportunities
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H1B Sponsor Likelynote

Responsibilities

Lead the full-stack mitigation strategy and implement solutions for biological and chemical misuse—from prevention to enforcement
Ensure safeguards integrate seamlessly across OpenAI products and scale with usage
Make decisive calls on technical trade-offs within the bio risk domain
Partner with risk modeling leadership to align mitigation design with anticipated risks and coverage
Drive rigorous safeguard testing by stress-testing the mitigation stack against evolving threats and product surfaces

Qualification

Deep learningPyTorchTensorFlowTechnical safeguardsData structuresAlgorithmsSoftware engineeringAI safetyDecisive leadershipBiosecurity knowledgeComputational biologyCollaborative teamwork

Required

Have a passion for AI safety and are motivated to make cutting-edge AI models safer for real-world use
Bring demonstrated experience in deep learning and transformer models
Are proficient with frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow
Possess a strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and software engineering principles
Are familiar with methods for training and fine-tuning large language models, including distillation, supervised fine-tuning, and policy optimization
Excel at working collaboratively with cross-functional teams across research, policy, product, and engineering
Show decisive leadership in high-stakes, ambiguous environments
Have significant experience designing and deploying technical safeguards at scale

Preferred

Bring background knowledge in biosecurity, computational biology, or adjacent technical fields

Company

OpenAI

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OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that develops advanced AI models, including ChatGPT. It is a sub-organization of OpenAI Foundation.
dateFounded in 2015
location
San Francisco, California, USA
people-size201-500 employees
web-link
https://www.openai.com

H1B Sponsorship

OpenAI has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (1)
2024 (1)
2023 (1)
2022 (18)
2021 (10)
2020 (6)

Funding

Current Stage
Growth Stage
Total Funding
$79B
Key Investors
The Walt Disney CompanySoftBankThrive Capital
2025-12-11Corporate Round· $1B
2025-10-02Secondary Market· $6.6B
2025-03-31Series Unknown· $40B

Leadership Team

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Sam Altman
CEO & Co-Founder
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Greg Brockman
President, Chairman, & Co-Founder
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