Strategic Overview
Research Engineer / Research Scientist / AI Systems Engineer, RSI at OpenAI is a dev opportunity centered on the specialist responsibilities and outcomes described in the employer's listing.
The published role emphasizes work such as Design evaluations for research judgment, hypothesis generation and testing, and long-horizon experiment execution. Improve model research capabilities through agent harnesses, synthetic data, RL environments, and model training.
The role is listed for San Francisco with hybrid working arrangement, giving candidates the practical context needed to assess fit before applying. Relevant signals in the listing include Research.
Key information at a glance
About This Role
About the Team
The Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) team works across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure to build AI systems that accelerate and ultimately conduct high-quality research at OpenAI. We work to automate real research workflows and improve research productivity by building systems and feedback loops, designing evaluations, and training models to develop missing capabilities.
Our work spans the full lifecycle of model training, evaluation, and deployment to help researchers move faster and tackle increasingly ambitious problems.
Key Responsibilities & Objectives
- Design evaluations for research judgment, hypothesis generation and testing, and long-horizon experiment execution.
- Improve model research capabilities through agent harnesses, synthetic data, RL environments, and model training.
- Build and maintain safe, reliable integrations between our models and OpenAI’s research infrastructure.
- Develop research agents, experiment-orchestration systems, and sandboxed runtimes that support real research workflows.
Salary & Benefits
Published compensation: $295K – $445K
Salary Benchmark
This role’s published compensation is compared with current employer-disclosed salary ranges for the same role in the same currency.
Benchmark uses active employer job postings in our database and excludes this listing. It is not a third-party salary estimate, and currencies are not converted.
Full Job Description
The following is the complete job description supplied by the source. We sanitize unsafe markup and remove external links, but do not shorten or rewrite the employer's source content.
About the Team
The Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) team works across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure to build AI systems that accelerate and ultimately conduct high-quality research at OpenAI. We work to automate real research workflows and improve research productivity by building systems and feedback loops, designing evaluations, and training models to develop missing capabilities.
Our work spans the full lifecycle of model training, evaluation, and deployment to help researchers move faster and tackle increasingly ambitious problems.
About the Role
We’re hiring research scientists, research engineers, and AI systems engineers to work on automating research at OpenAI.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA.
In this role, you will:
Design evaluations for research judgment, hypothesis generation and testing, and long-horizon experiment execution.
Turn real research workflows and model failures into data and evaluation flywheels.
Improve model research capabilities through agent harnesses, synthetic data, RL environments, and model training.
Build and maintain safe, reliable integrations between our models and OpenAI’s research infrastructure.
Develop research agents, experiment-orchestration systems, and sandboxed runtimes that support real research workflows.
Create metrics and economic models to understand RSI’s current and future effects on research productivity, model capabilities, and the safety of internal deployments.
This is a high-ownership role for researchers and engineers who thrive in ambiguity, move fluidly between research and implementation, and turn emerging opportunities into rigorous, reliable, scalable results.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have research or engineering experience across LLM training, model evaluations, agent systems, synthetic data, research infrastructure, or large-scale distributed systems.
Are a strong generalist who can move between open-ended research and practical implementation, turning ambiguous problems into clear results.
Collaborate effectively across the full stack, including systems, data, model training, evaluations, and other research teams.
Are comfortable building and maintaining the data pipelines, tooling, and infrastructure needed to support emerging AI capabilities.
Are comfortable working on problems without clear definitions or established playbooks.
Think rigorously about scientific quality, research taste, safety, privacy, reliability, performance, and scale.
Are excited about using increasingly capable AI systems to accelerate meaningful research.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Editor’s Market Perspective (Our Custom Analysis)
Why This Position Matters
This dev opening is a useful opportunity for candidates whose experience matches Research. Its strongest career signal is the scope of the work itself — particularly Design evaluations for research judgment, hypothesis generation and testing, and long-horizon experiment execution. — rather than a generic title alone.
Resume & Application Strategy
For the application, mirror the employer's language where it truthfully matches your background: foreground Research, quantify outcomes from comparable work, and place the most relevant experience near the top of the resume. If the listing specifies tools, platforms, leadership scope, or domain experience, use those exact terms in context instead of presenting an unrelated keyword list.
We organize source-provided information into this independent job-seeker overview. Compensation is shown only when the source provides it; the official listing remains the authority for current requirements and application instructions.