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OpenAIOpenAISan Francisco, CA

Researcher, Alignment Oversight

Designs and runs experiments to improve oversight of increasingly capable AI models, including model training, evaluation, and deployment of practical systems. Analyzes failures and develops techniques to train more aligned models using oversight signals.

250k – 445k/yr
HybridML Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement alignment experiments focused on oversight systems for increasingly agentic AI models.
  • Deploy practical systems for action monitoring, red-teaming, and human-in-the-loop control.
  • Develop evaluations for alignment failure modes of frontier models such as overeagerness, instruction following failures, covert actions, avoiding restrictions, and scheming propensity.
  • Analyze deployment data to understand model failures, oversight gaps, and opportunities for training more aligned models.
  • Develop techniques for feeding oversight signals back into training while preserving the reliability and independence of the oversight process.
  • Produce externally publishable research when results advance the broader science of alignment.
  • Collaborate across research, product, security, safety, and engineering teams to turn alignment ideas into working systems.
  • Move quickly from research intuition to working experiments, prototypes, and evidence that can shape future models.

Requirements

  • Strong hands-on experience training, evaluating, or debugging large ML models, especially LLMs.
  • Experience with reinforcement learning, post-training, preference optimization, scalable oversight, model evaluation, or adjacent empirical ML research.
  • Strong engineering execution and ability to turn ambiguous research ideas into reliable experiments, tools, training pipelines, and production-facing systems.
  • Research intuitions for what experiments are likely to teach us something, while staying grounded in implementation details and empirical results.
  • Team player - willing to do a variety of tasks that move the team forward.
  • Enjoy fast-paced, collaborative research environments where priorities shift as models and evidence change.
  • See safety and usefulness as coupled goals.

Skills

Machine LearningLLMsReinforcement LearningPost-TrainingPreference OptimizationScalable OversightModel EvaluationPyTorchTraining PipelinesEvaluation DesignRed-TeamingAction Monitoring

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