Data & AnalyticsHybrid

Research Engineer / Research Scientist / AI Systems Engineer, RSI

OpenAI · Hybrid

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Last seen by MeritLog September 12, 2026Source: AshbySource version: ashby-public-job-posting-v1

MeritLog read this listing from OpenAI's Ashby job board and last checked it on September 12, 2026.

Source: the employer's Ashby job board. Open the original listing for current details.

Job details

Work model: Hybrid
Salary: $295K - $445K
Location: San Francisco

Hiring context

How this role compares at OpenAI

OpenAI has 798 live roles in MeritLog’s catalog across 14 job families, and 294 of them are in data & analytics. 664 of those listings publish a pay range, a disclosure rate of 83%.

This role's posted range of $295K - $445K sits above 80% of the 651 other OpenAI roles quoted over the same currency and period.

OpenAI concentrates this hiring in:

Counted across the job boards MeritLog tracks, at the time this page was served. Pay comparisons use only listings that publish a complete range in the same currency and period.

What the role asks for

What you'd do

Design evaluations for research judgment, hypothesis generation and testing, and long-horizon experiment execution.
Turn real research workflows and model failures into data and evaluation flywheels.
Improve model research capabilities through agent harnesses, synthetic data, RL environments, and model training.
Build and maintain safe, reliable integrations between our models and OpenAI’s research infrastructure.
Develop research agents, experiment-orchestration systems, and sandboxed runtimes that support real research workflows.
Create metrics and economic models to understand RSI’s current and future effects on research productivity, model capabilities, and the safety of internal deployments.

What they're asking for

Have research or engineering experience across LLM training, model evaluations, agent systems, synthetic data, research infrastructure, or large-scale distributed systems.Skill
Are a strong generalist who can move between open-ended research and practical implementation, turning ambiguous problems into clear results.Skill
Collaborate effectively across the full stack, including systems, data, model training, evaluations, and other research teams.Skill
Are comfortable building and maintaining the data pipelines, tooling, and infrastructure needed to support emerging AI capabilities.Skill
Are comfortable working on problems without clear definitions or established playbooks.Skill
Think rigorously about scientific quality, research taste, safety, privacy, reliability, performance, and scale.Skill
Are excited about using increasingly capable AI systems to accelerate meaningful research.Skill

Parsed by MeritLog from the employer’s own posting. The full description follows below.

Job description

About the Team The Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) team works across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure to build AI systems that accelerate and ultimately conduct high-quality research at OpenAI. We work to automate real research workflows and improve research productivity by building systems and feedback loops, designing evaluations, and training models to develop missing capabilities. Our work spans the full lifecycle of model training, evaluation, and deployment to help researchers move faster and tackle increasingly ambitious problems. About the Role We’re hiring research scientists, research engineers, and AI systems engineers to work on automating research at OpenAI. This role is based in San Francisco, CA. In this role, you will: - Design evaluations for research judgment, hypothesis generation and testing, and long-horizon experiment execution. - Turn real research workflows and model failures into data and evaluation flywheels. - Improve model research capabilities through agent harnesses, synthetic data, RL environments, and model training. - Build and maintain safe, reliable integrations between our models and OpenAI’s research infrastructure. - Develop research agents, experiment-orchestration systems, and sandboxed runtimes that support real research workflows. - Create metrics and economic models to understand RSI’s current and future effects on research productivity, model capabilities, and the safety of internal deployments. This is a high-ownership role for researchers and engineers who thrive in ambiguity, move fluidly between research and implementation, and turn emerging opportunities into rigorous, reliable, scalable results. You might thrive in this role if you: - Have research or engineering experience across LLM training, model evaluations, agent systems, synthetic data, research infrastructure, or large-scale distributed systems. - Are a strong generalist who can move between open-ended research and practical implementation, turning ambiguous problems into clear results. - Collaborate effectively across the full stack, including systems, data, model training, evaluations, and other research teams. - Are comfortable building and maintaining the data pipelines, tooling, and infrastructure needed to support emerging AI capabilities. - Are comfortable working on problems without clear definitions or established playbooks. - Think rigorously about scientific quality, research taste, safety, privacy, reliability, performance, and scale. - Are excited about using increasingly capable AI systems to accelerate meaningful research. 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. 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 https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. 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 https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf 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.

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