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OpenAIOpenAISan Francisco, CA

Researcher, Alignment Training

Senior researcher studies how training choices shape aligned behavior in frontier models, developing synthetic data, evaluation loops, and experiments to ensure durable, robust tendencies like honest reasoning and instruction-following.

250k – 445k
On-siteAI Research

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Develop synthetic data methods that teach models higher-level behavioral tendencies, such as understanding user intent, following instructions reliably, reasoning clearly, being honest, and acting consistently with intended goals and constraints.
  • Study how pre-training, mid-training, and post-training each shape downstream model behavior, and which interventions are best applied at which stage.
  • Build evaluation loops that connect model behavior back to training data and training objectives, so the team can iterate faster and with clearer signal.
  • Design reusable data generation and filtering pipelines that improve the quality, diversity, and robustness of training data.
  • Create experiments that distinguish durable learned behavior from benchmark gains, distribution-specific effects, or evaluation artifacts.
  • Collaborate across pre-training, post-training, alignment, and product-facing teams to translate research insights into better model behavior.
  • Help define the research agenda for alignment training: which behaviors should remain invariant across settings, which should adapt, and how to measure whether models have learned an underlying principle rather than a surface pattern.

Requirements

  • Strong record of technically excellent work in large-scale ML, especially in pre-training, post-training, synthetic data, model evaluation, or training infrastructure.
  • Comfortable designing experiments where the signal is subtle, noisy, or indirect.
  • Can move between research taste and engineering execution: forming hypotheses, building pipelines, running experiments, analyzing results, and turning findings into the next iteration.
  • Unusually good judgment about which research questions are worth pursuing and which signals are strong enough to trust.
  • Care about making models more useful, honest, steerable, and reliable for real users.
  • Excited by alignment problems, even if you have not worked in alignment before.
  • Communicate clearly across research, engineering, and product contexts.
  • Prefer practical, evidence-driven work grounded in experiments.

Skills

Machine LearningLLMsSynthetic DataPre-TrainingPost-TrainingModel EvaluationTraining InfrastructureData PipelinesExperiment DesignAlignment Research

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