Machine Learning Engineer, Implicit Signals
OpenAI is hiring a Machine Learning Engineer, Implicit Signals for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $381k-$510k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on Level.
AI in this role
About the Team
Our team builds classification and evaluation systems that give post-training and research teams fast, reliable feedback on model behavior. We combine machine learning and production engineering to make these capabilities accurate, efficient, and useful at scale, helping researchers assess changes and improve models and products.
We work closely with research teams to develop useful measurements and make them practical to run. Our work spans classifier development, rigorous evaluation, and efficient production inference, with ownership from initial experimentation through deployment and continued improvement.
About the Role
We’re looking for a machine learning engineer to develop new classification and evaluation capabilities and bring them into production. You’ll help turn open-ended questions about model behavior into well-defined ML problems, build methods that address them, and establish how reliably those methods work.
This role combines traditional machine learning, model evaluation, and real-time engineering. You’ll own classifiers throughout their lifecycle, including supervised fine-tuning, distillation, evaluation, deployment, and production inference. You’ll work closely with researchers to identify valuable problems and with software engineers to make promising approaches useful at scale.
In this role, you will:
Build, deploy, and operate production classification and evaluation systems that provide useful feedback to post-training and research teams.
Optimize production inference, including model serving, batching, caching, throughput, latency, compute utilization, and cost.
Train and optimize classifiers using supervised fine-tuning and distillation, validating quality and efficiency before deployment.
Own the reliability and observability of deployed classifiers, diagnose production issues, and improve their performance over time.
Design rigorous evaluations that assess accuracy, calibration, generalization, and potential measurement bias while guiding production tradeoffs.
Partner with software engineers to integrate models into reliable execution systems and support safe rollouts.
Build reusable engineering tools that make classifier training, evaluation, deployment, and iteration faster and more repeatable.
Work with post-training researchers and data scientists to translate their needs into modeling objectives, evaluation criteria, and production requirements.
Your background might look something like
Experience taking ML projects from problem formulation and experimentation through production deployment.
Strong foundations in supervised learning, statistics, and experimental design.
Practical experience evaluating models, investigating systematic errors, and working with imperfect labels.
Strong software engineering skills and the ability to build maintainable production ML systems.
Experience reasoning about inference performance and the tradeoffs between quality, latency, and compute cost.
The ability to combine careful scientific judgment with a practical approach to shipping and operating software.
Comfort working closely with researchers and engineers on open-ended problems.
Fluency in using AI agents to move quickly across multiple workstreams in a fast-paced environment.
Experience with model distillation, representation learning, calibration, or efficient inference is a plus.
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.
How we rate this
Machine Learning Engineer, Implicit Signals at OpenAI rates 98 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in machine learning engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $381k
- Typical machine learning engineer job
- $199k
This posting starts 92% above the typical machine learning engineer job. See machine learning engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- How do you decide when an AI agent can act on its own versus asking for approval first?
- Walk me through fine-tuning a model: what data did you use, and how did you check the result?
- How do you decide that one model's output is better than another's for a given task?
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI agents, Fine-tuning, AI Evaluation, and AI Research. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
Want an expert to read your CV for this job?
Free. Send your CV and the role you want next. We reply by email within 2 to 4 business days.
Get new remote machine learning engineer jobs (Builds AI ●●●●) by email
One email a week with the new remote machine learning engineer jobs (Builds AI ●●●●), each rated for how much AI is in the work. No recruiter spam, unsubscribe in one click.
Free. One email a week. Unsubscribe in one click.
Similar roles
Data roles that build AI, at other companies.
What kind of AI work fits you?
Answer 12 practical questions in about three minutes. Get a simple profile, the work it points to, and live roles to explore next.
Find my next step