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Research Engineer, Frontier Evals & Environments

OpenAI
OpenAI Salary
San Francisco, CA Full Time
POSTED ON 1/7/2026
AVAILABLE BEFORE 4/24/2026
About The Team

The Frontier Evals & Environments team builds north star model environments to drive progress towards safe AGI/ASI. This team builds ambitious environments to measure and steer our models, and creates self-improvement loops to steer our training, safety, and launch decisions. Some of the team's open-sourced evaluations include GDPval, SWE-bench Verified, MLE-bench, PaperBench, and SWE-Lancer, and the team built and ran frontier evaluations for GPT4o, o1, o3, GPT 4.5, ChatGPT Agent, and GPT5. If you are interested in feeling firsthand the fast progress of our models, and steering them towards good, this is the team for you.

About You

We seek exceptional research engineers that can push the boundaries of our frontier models. Specifically, we are looking for those that will help us shape our empirical grasp of the whole spectrum of AI capabilities measurement and will own individual threads within this endeavor end-to-end.

In This Role, You'll

  • Create ambitious RL environments to push our models to their limits
  • Work on measuring frontier model capabilities, skills, and behaviors
  • Develop new methodologies for automatically exploring the behavior of these models
  • Help steer training for our largest training runs, and see the future first
  • Design scalable systems and processes to support continuous evaluation
  • Build self-improvement loops to automate model understanding

We Expect You To Be

  • Passionate and knowledgeable about AGI/ASI measurement
  • Strong engineering and statistical analysis skills
  • Able to think outside the box and have a robust “red-teaming mindset”
  • Experienced in ML research engineering, stochastic systems, observability and monitoring, LLM-enabled applications, and/or another technical domain applicable to AI evaluations
  • Able to operate effectively in a dynamic and extremely fast-paced research environment as well as scope and deliver projects end-to-end

It Would Be Great If You Also Have

  • First-hand experience in red-teaming systems—be it computer systems or otherwise
  • An ability to work cross-functionally
  • Excellent communication skills

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

Compensation Range: $200K - $370K

Salary : $200,000 - $370,000

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