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OpenAI

Research Engineer / Research Scientist - Post Training, Memory

OpenAI is hiring a Research Engineer / Research Scientist - Post Training, Memory in San Francisco, United States. It pays $380k-$500k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenAI.

Level's read on this job

  • Builds AI ●●●● is how Level rates this research scientist role: the job is building AI systems.
  • The listed pay starts 100% above the typical research scientist posting on Level.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include AI research.
  • Level lists 819 other open roles at OpenAI.

AI in this role

ai-research

About the Team

The Personalization-Memory team, within OpenAI's broader Post Training organization, is focused on developing agents that can learn from prior interactions in order to become more helpful and efficient over time. We build general-purpose memory and personalization capabilities that transfer across ChatGPT and other agentic products, and we collaborate with applied engineering on the product surfaces that allow users to interact with memory.

About the Role

As a Research Engineer / Research Scientist on the Personalization-Memory team, your work will span memory architecture, post-training, and developing long-horizon tasks for training and evaluations.

We're looking for individuals who have a background in reinforcement learning research, are able to iterate quickly, and who can convert scientific rigor and long-term research into realized product impact.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

  • Own and pursue a research agenda for improving long-horizon memory and personalization in frontier models.

  • Build robust evaluations for tracking modeling improvements.

  • Design, implement, test, and debug code across our research stack.

  • Collaborate closely with the research and product teams to influence the shape of technical solutions in the product.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Love being on the cutting edge of RL and frontier model research.

  • Value principled approaches and research craftsmanship.

  • Are passionate about long-horizon tasks, memory, and turning your research into product impact.

  • Are comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug.

  • Thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic, and technically complex environment.

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

Research Engineer / Research Scientist - Post Training, Memory at OpenAI rates 93 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.

Classification

Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

AI Research

Also common in research scientist jobs at this level

Pay

This job starts at
$380k
Typical research scientist job
$190k

This posting starts 100% above the typical research scientist job. See research scientist jobs

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
  2. How would you decide a model or AI system is ready to ship?
  3. Tell me about a time a model underperformed in production. How did you find out, and what did you change?

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: 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.

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