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OpenAIOpenAISan Francisco, CA

Researcher, Alignment Science

Designs and runs experiments to improve AI model intent alignment, honesty, calibration, and robustness using RL and empirical ML methods. Trains/evaluates large models like LLMs and integrates techniques into production workflows.

250k – 445k
HybridAI Research

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Design and implement alignment experiments focused on intent following, honesty, calibration, and robustness.
  • Train and evaluate models using reinforcement learning, and other empirical ML methods.
  • Develop evaluations for failure modes such as hallucination, instruction-following failures, reward hacking, covert actions, and scheming.
  • Study methods that encourage models to verify their behavior and report shortcomings honestly, including confession-style training objectives.
  • Build monitoring and inference-time interventions that ensure compliant behavior or surface model issues to users or downstream systems.
  • Investigate how alignment methods scale with model capability, compute, data, context length, action length, and adversarial pressure.
  • Integrate successful techniques into model training and deployment workflows.
  • Produce externally publishable research when results advance the broader science of alignment.
  • Collaborate with researchers and engineers across post-training, RL, evaluations, safety, and product-facing teams.

Requirements

  • Strong hands-on experience training, evaluating, or debugging large ML models, especially LLMs.
  • Excellent engineering skills in Python and modern ML frameworks such as PyTorch.
  • Mathematical rigor, quantitative taste, and comfort turning ambiguous research questions into measurable experiments.
  • Experience with reinforcement learning, post-training, preference optimization, scalable oversight, model evaluation, or adjacent empirical ML research.
  • Ability to operate with high independence.
  • Enjoy fast-paced, collaborative research environments.
  • Strong record in technical problem solving (e.g., competitive programming, math contests, systems work).
  • Motivation to build trustworthy, honest, and reliable AI systems.

Skills

PyTorchPythonReinforcement LearningLLMsModel EvaluationPreference OptimizationScalable OversightPost-TrainingEmpirical MlResearch Infrastructure

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