OpenAI · 4 hours ago
Research Engineer / Research Scientist - Foundations Retrieval Lead
San Francisco, CA
Full-time
Hybrid
Lead/Staff
$460K/yr - $555K/yrOpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They are seeking a technical research lead for their Foundations Research team to advance embedding-focused retrieval efforts, manage a team of researchers, and drive innovations in representation techniques. The role will support retrieval across various OpenAI products and internal research efforts, providing opportunities for scientific publication and technical impact.
Agentic AIArtificial Intelligence (AI)Foundational AIGenerative AIMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingSaaS
Responsibilities
Lead research into embedding models and retrieval systems optimized for grounding, relevance, and adaptive reasoning
Manage a team of researchers and engineers building end-to-end infrastructure for training, evaluating, and integrating embeddings into frontier models
Drive innovation in dense, sparse, and hybrid representation techniques, metric learning, and learning-to-retrieve systems
Collaborate closely with Pretraining, Inference, and other Research teams to integrate retrieval throughout the model lifecycle
Contribute to OpenAI’s long-term vision of AI systems with memory and knowledge access capabilities rooted in learned representations
Qualification
Required
Proven experience leading high-performance teams of researchers or engineers in ML infrastructure or foundational research
Deep technical expertise in representation learning, embedding models, or vector retrieval systems
Familiarity with transformer-based LLMs and how embedding spaces can interact with language model objectives
Research experience in areas such as contrastive learning, supervised or unsupervised embedding learning, or metric learning
A track record of building or scaling large machine learning systems, particularly embedding pipelines in production or research contexts
A first-principles mindset for challenging assumptions about how retrieval and memory should work for large models
Benefits
Relocation assistance
Company
OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that develops advanced AI models, including ChatGPT. It is a sub-organization of OpenAI Foundation.
Founded in 2015
201-500 employees
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 StageTotal Funding
$79BKey Investors
The Walt Disney CompanySoftBankThrive Capital
2025-12-11Corporate Round· $1B
2025-10-02Secondary Market· $6.6B
2025-03-31Series Unknown· $40B
Leadership Team
Sam Altman
CEO & Co-Founder
Greg Brockman
President, Chairman, & Co-Founder
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