Skip to content
OpenAIOpenAISan Francisco, CA

Researcher, Recursive Self-Improvement Safety

Conduct strategic, technically rigorous research to anticipate and mitigate loss-of-control risks from increasingly capable AI systems, including recursive self-improvement. The role combines hypothesis-driven research, rapid prototyping, safety evaluations, monitoring, and institutionalizing effective interventions.

295k – 445k/yr
On-siteAI Research

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Anticipate future risks from increasingly capable AI systems, including risks associated with recursive self-improvement.
  • Translate open-ended safety objectives into concrete, prioritized research directions.
  • Build rapid prototypes and iteratively improve them into established components of safety pipelines.
  • Develop pre-deployment risk assessments, control measures, training interventions, and institutional practices for loss-of-control risks.
  • Establish scalable oversight and model-misbehavior monitoring practices for highly capable models.
  • Develop automated auditing approaches to identify severe misalignment in production traffic and elicit tail risks before deployment.
  • Test and red-team measurements of reward hacking, sandbagging, scheming, and other loss-of-control behaviors.
  • Design experiments and evaluations to study model misalignment and safety-relevant capabilities.
  • Develop model organisms of misbehavior and training interventions that improve safety-relevant capabilities.
  • Prototype technical mechanisms for verifying compliance with potential future AI safety agreements.
  • Measure progress toward automation of technical staff to inform alignment and security investments.
  • Identify and address blind spots in recursive self-improvement safety cases.
  • Secure organizational buy-in and communicate technical work clearly.
  • Collaborate with or manage other staff as needed.

Requirements

  • Exceptional technical execution ability.
  • Strong strategic and research judgment in domains with weak feedback loops.
  • Passion for mitigating risks associated with recursive self-improvement.
  • Willingness to prioritize work based on its potential positive impact on the future of AI development.

Nice-to-haves

  • Experience in machine learning research, AI alignment, AI verification, or a related domain.

Compensation

  • Annual salary: $295,000–$445,000

Skills

Machine Learningai alignmentai verificationscalable oversightautomated auditingred teamingmodel monitoringmisalignment detectionreward hackingchain-of-thought monitoringmodel evaluationsai safetyRisk Assessmentcontrol systemstraining interventions

Similar roles

AI Research jobs
OpenAI

Researcher, Frontier Risk Mitigations

OpenAISan Francisco, CA

Researcher developing evaluations, red-teaming pipelines, and novel mitigations for frontier AI safety risks. The role requires deep technical expertise, research engineering experience, advanced training in computer science or machine learning, and proficiency in Python or similar languages.

295k – 445k/yrOn-site4+ YOEAI Research
OpenAI

Research Engineer / Research Scientist / AI Systems Engineer, RSI

OpenAISan Francisco, CA

Develop AI systems that automate and accelerate research by designing evaluations, building research agents and orchestration infrastructure, and improving model capabilities through training and synthetic data. The role suits strong research or engineering generalists experienced with LLMs, evaluations, agents, infrastructure, or distributed systems.

295k – 445k/yrHybridAI Research
OpenAI

Research Engineer / Research Scientist - Personal AGI, Personalization

OpenAISan Francisco, CA

Researches and develops memory and personalization improvements for frontier models through post-training, reinforcement learning, dataset creation, and evaluations. The role requires strong machine-learning expertise, research craftsmanship, and the ability to work across a large codebase with research and product teams.

295k – 555k/yrHybridAI Research
OpenAI

Researcher, Multimodal Safety

OpenAISan Francisco, CA

Conducts research to improve the safety of multimodal AI systems spanning text, vision, and audio. The role requires experience building multimodal models, post-training frontier systems, designing safety evaluations, and translating research findings into reliable model behavior.

295k – 445k/yrHybridAI Research
OpenAI

Researcher, Synthetic RL

OpenAISan Francisco, CA

Develops novel reinforcement learning techniques using synthetic environments and feedback to enhance large-scale AI models. Designs experiments, analyzes dynamics, and integrates research into production systems; requires strong RL/ML background and engineering skills.

295k – 445k/yrHybridAI Research