OpenAI · 2 months ago
Research Engineer / Scientist, Pretraining Safety
San Francisco
Full-time
Onsite
Mid, Senior Level
$310K/yr - $460K/yrOpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Pretraining Safety team is pioneering methods to integrate safety into models before they reach deployment, focusing on identifying unsafe behaviors and developing safer architectures during the pre-training phase.
Agentic AIArtificial Intelligence (AI)Foundational AIGenerative AIMachine LearningNatural Language ProcessingSaaS
Responsibilities
Develop new techniques to predict, measure, and evaluate unsafe behavior in early-stage models
Design data curation strategies that improve pretraining priors and reduce downstream risk
Explore safe-by-design architectures and training configurations that improve controllability
Introduce novel safety-oriented loss functions, metrics, and evals into the pretraining stack
Work closely with cross-functional safety teams to unify pre- and post-training risk reduction
Qualification
Required
Have experience developing or scaling pretraining architectures (LLMs, diffusion models, multimodal models, etc.)
Are comfortable working with training infrastructure, data pipelines, and evaluation frameworks (e.g., Python, PyTorch/JAX, Apache Beam)
Enjoy hands-on research — designing, implementing, and iterating on experiments
Enjoy collaborating with diverse technical and cross-functional partners (e.g., policy, legal, training)
Are data-driven with strong statistical reasoning and rigor in experimental design
Value building clean, scalable research workflows and streamlining processes for yourself and others
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
Recent News
Wanganui Chronicle
2026-01-17
2026-01-17
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