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OpenAIOpenAI

Researcher, Alignment CoT Monitorability

Researcher designing and running experiments on chain-of-thought monitorability in frontier LLMs to support scalable oversight and alignment. Requires strong empirical ML expertise with LLMs, deep interest in model behavior/alignment/interpretability, and ability to translate ambiguous questions into concrete experiments.

About the job

Responsibilities

  • Design and run empirical studies of chain-of-thought monitorability across frontier reasoning models and training settings.
  • Build evaluations that measure whether monitors can reliably predict properties of interest, including high-stakes forms of misbehavior.
  • Investigate how pre-training, synthetic data, mid-training, post-training, reinforcement learning, and other interventions improve or degrade monitorability.
  • Analyze model behavior and turn observations from monitoring into hypotheses, experiments, and recommendations.
  • Translate research findings into practical monitoring and oversight approaches that can inform real training runs.
  • Collaborate with researchers and engineers across model training, alignment evaluations, monitoring, and frontier-risk work.
  • Produce externally publishable research when results advance the broader science of alignment.

Requirements

  • Strong hands-on experience training, evaluating, or debugging large ML models, especially LLMs.
  • Deep curiosity, interest in alignment, and high agency.
  • Depth in alignment, interpretability, model behavior, empirical ML, or adjacent research.
  • Ability to turn ambiguous research questions into measurable experiments and follow the evidence when results are subtle or noisy.
  • Comfort moving between research ideation and engineering execution.
  • Curiosity about multiple approaches to understanding model behavior.
  • High independence while collaborating closely across research and engineering teams.
  • Care about making increasingly capable AI systems more monitorable, trustworthy, and safe.

Nice-to-Haves

  • Direct chain-of-thought interpretability experience.
  • Experience with monitoring methods and scalable oversight.

Skills

LLMs, Empirical Ml, Model Training, Model Evaluation, Model Debugging, Reinforcement Learning, Interpretability, Alignment Research, Chain-Of-Thought, Scalable Oversight

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