Jobs Companies OpenAI Researcher, Agent Safety, Training and Evaluations

About this Researcher, Agent Safety, Training and Evaluations role at OpenAI

OpenAI · Hybrid · San Francisco

About the Team

The Agent Safety team works to ensure that increasingly capable AI agents act safely, exercise sound judgment, and remain aligned with user intent. Our mission is to reduce the probability of severe unintended outcomes from increasingly capable AI agents while preserving their ability to act effectively and autonomously.

Our work spans three areas:

  • Training: Create training methods, environments and data that teach agents to make better decisions in consequential situations. We turn real-world failures into training signals that prevent similar incidents, and identify precursor behaviors and mitigations to address emerging risks.

  • Measurements: Build evaluations and production metrics that identify emerging risks and measure whether our interventions work.

  • Oversight: Develop oversight and system mitigation mechanisms that reduce harmful actions while preserving useful autonomy (for example future versions of auto-review).

About the Role
We’re looking for strong executors with excellent judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and an understanding of frontier model research. You don’t need prior safety or alignment experience, we also welcome people that recently realized that alignment and safety is a critical area to contribute to.

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:

  • Train and evaluate frontier models to reduce harmful or misaligned agent actions, forming clear hypotheses and executing independently through ambiguity.

  • Mine incidents and build scalable measurement, data-processing, and evaluation systems that turn real failures into repeatable safety signals.

  • Collaborate closely with post-training, capabilities, oversight, and pre-training partners to ship research-backed mitigations into large-scale training and agent systems.

You might thrive in this role if you:

  • Have demonstrated strength in research engineering, ML engineering, quantitative research, or applied model research, with the ability to own ambiguous projects end to end.

  • Bring excellent technical execution across experimentation, data, evaluation, and/or infrastructure, plus strong intuition for modern frontier-model research.

  • Are motivated by agent safety and eager to work on urgent, practical problems even if your prior work was outside safety or alignment.

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.

Ready to apply to OpenAI?
Apply to OpenAI

How this Researcher salary compares

This role pays $440,000/yrabove the typical range for Researcher roles.

$103,850 median $210,500 $440,000

Typical range $179,625–$311,700/yr, from 70 comparable Researcher listings on JobsRadar (pay annualized to USD). See Researcher salary insights →

Similar jobs

Eight Sleep
Research Associate
Eight Sleep
⚡ Apply early San Francisco Onsite
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 7h ago
Pinterest
Sr. Staff Quantitative Product Researcher
Pinterest
⚡ Apply early San Francisco, CA, US; Remote,... · location restricted $163,639–$336,903
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 21h ago
DoorDash USA
Associate Manager, AI Research Lab Strategy & Operations
DoorDash USA
⚡ Apply early San Francisco, CA; Sunnyvale,... Onsite $124,000–$155,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 22h ago
DoorDash USA
Member of Technical Staff, Lead Researcher
DoorDash USA
⚡ Apply early San Francisco, CA; Sunnyvale,... Onsite $203,500–$299,300
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 22h ago
Triumph
Quant Strategist
Triumph
⚡ Apply early San Francisco HQ Onsite $200,000–$400,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 22h ago
OpenAI
Researcher, Training
OpenAI
⚡ Apply early San Francisco Hybrid $300,000–$600,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 22h ago
CivilGrid
UX Researcher
CivilGrid
⚡ Apply early Boston Hybrid $119,000–$160,984
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 22h ago
OpenAI
Researcher, Agent Safety, Oversight and System Mitigations
OpenAI
⚡ Apply early San Francisco Hybrid $380,000–$500,000
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 1d ago
Ōura
Staff UX Researcher, Personalization
Ōura
⚡ Apply early Hybrid - San Francisco, Califo... Hybrid
● New 👁 Seen ✓ Applied 1d ago

Sign up for suggestions tailored to the jobs you open and the searches you save.

More jobs at OpenAI

See all jobs at OpenAI →

Apply now
🤖

Whoa — hold up

JobsRadar was built for real people having a rough time in their job search — not for automated requests. You're clicking way too fast and you're now temporarily blocked.

Come back later. If you're genuinely job hunting, we've got your back — just act like a human.

Catch your next role the second it’s posted.

Create a free account and we’ll watch the boards for you — the instant a job matches your search, it lands in your inbox or Telegram. No digging, no refreshing.

Create free account

Free forever · takes 30 seconds · already have one?

Get an edge on your job hunt.

Join our Telegram channel for the stuff that helps you land the role — salary benchmarks, the weekly market pulse, and new-feature drops. No spam, just signal.

Join the channel — it's free