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OpenAIOpenAISan Francisco, CA

Research Engineer / Research Scientist - Foundations Retrieval IC

Develops embedding models and retrieval systems to enable frontier AI models to access relevant information dynamically. Requires deep expertise in representation learning, vector retrieval, and transformer LLMs, with experience scaling ML systems.

445k – 555k
HybridAI Research

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Tackle embedding models and retrieval systems optimized for grounding, relevance, and adaptive reasoning.
  • Collaborate with a team of researchers and engineers building end-to-end infrastructure for training, evaluating, and integrating embeddings into frontier models.
  • Drive innovation in dense, sparse, and hybrid representation techniques, metric learning, and learning-to-retrieve systems.
  • Collaborate closely with Pretraining, Inference, and other Research teams to integrate retrieval throughout the model lifecycle.
  • Contribute to OpenAI’s long-term vision of AI systems with memory and knowledge access capabilities rooted in learned representations.

Requirements

  • Proven experience leading high-performance teams of researchers or engineers in ML infrastructure or foundational research.
  • Deep technical expertise in representation learning, embedding models, or vector retrieval systems.
  • Familiarity with transformer-based LLMs and how embedding spaces can interact with language model objectives.
  • Research experience in areas such as contrastive learning, supervised or unsupervised embedding learning, or metric learning.
  • A track record of building or scaling large machine learning systems, particularly embedding pipelines in production or research contexts.
  • A first-principles mindset for challenging assumptions about how retrieval and memory should work for large models.

Skills

EmbeddingsRetrieval SystemsRepresentation LearningTransformer-Based LlmsContrastive LearningMetric LearningVector StoresMachine Learning InfrastructureDense RepresentationsSparse Representations

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