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OpenAIOpenAISan Francisco, CA

Researcher, Pretraining Safety

Develop techniques to predict and mitigate unsafe behaviors in early-stage base models, design safer pretraining architectures, and integrate safety signals throughout training. Collaborate across safety teams to build robust, scalable safety foundations grounded in real-world risks.

295k – 445k/yr
On-siteAI Research

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Develop new techniques to predict, measure, and evaluate unsafe behavior in early-stage models
  • Design data curation strategies that improve pretraining priors and reduce downstream risk
  • Explore safe-by-design architectures and training configurations that improve controllability
  • Introduce novel safety-oriented loss functions, metrics, and evals into the pretraining stack
  • Work closely with cross-functional safety teams to unify pre- and post-training risk reduction

Requirements

  • Experience developing or scaling pretraining architectures (LLMs, diffusion models, multimodal models, etc.)
  • Comfortable working with training infrastructure, data pipelines, and evaluation frameworks (e.g., Python, PyTorch/JAX, Apache Beam)
  • Enjoy hands-on research — designing, implementing, and iterating on experiments
  • Enjoy collaborating with diverse technical and cross-functional partners (e.g., policy, legal, training)
  • Data-driven with strong statistical reasoning and rigor in experimental design
  • Value building clean, scalable research workflows and streamlining processes

Skills

PyTorchJAXPythonApache BeamLLMsDiffusion ModelsMultimodal ModelsStatistical ReasoningData PipelinesEvaluation Frameworks

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