Researcher, Recursive Self-Improvement Preparedness

Location San Francisco Employment Type Full time Department Safety Systems Compensation Estimated Base Salary $295K – $445K The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non‑exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance‑related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits. Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts Pre‑tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit) 401(k) retirement plan with employer match Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non‑birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks) Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non‑exempt employees 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law) Mental health and wellness support Employer‑paid basic life and disability coverage Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible Relocation support for eligible employees Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided. More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process. This role is at‑will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions. About the team The Safety Systems org ensures that OpenAI’s most capable models can be responsibly developed and deployed. We build evaluations, safeguards, and safety frameworks that help our models behave as intended in real‑world settings. The Preparedness team is an important part of the Safety Systems org at OpenAI, and is guided by OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework. Frontier AI models have the potential to benefit all of humanity, but also pose increasingly severe risks. To ensure that AI promotes positive change, the Preparedness team helps us prepare for the development of increasingly capable frontier AI models. This team is tasked with identifying, tracking, and preparing for catastrophic risks related to frontier AI models. The mission of the Preparedness team is to: Closely monitor and predict the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems, with an eye towards risks whose impact could be catastrophic. Ensure we have concrete procedures, infrastructure and partnerships to mitigate these risks and to safely handle the development of powerful AI systems. Preparedness tightly connects capability assessment, evaluations, and internal red teaming, and mitigations for frontier models, as well as overall coordination on AGI preparedness. This is fast paced, exciting work that has far reaching importance for the company and for society. About the role As frontier AI systems become more capable, they are increasingly able to pursue long‑horizon goals, use tools, adapt to feedback, and operate with greater autonomy. These advances create enormous potential benefits, but they also introduce the risk that models may behave in ways that are misaligned, deceptive, or difficult to supervise or contain. Reducing loss of control risk is therefore a core challenge for safely developing and deploying advanced AI systems. As a Researcher for loss of control mitigations, you will help design and implement an end‑to‑end mitigation stack to reduce the risk of intentionally subversive or insufficiently controllable model behavior across OpenAI’s products and internal deployments. This role requires strong technical depth and close cross‑functional collaboration to ensure safeguards are enforceable, scalable, and effective. You’ll contribute directly to building protections that remain robust as model capabilities, deployment patterns, and threat models evolve. In this role, you will: Design and implement mitigation components for loss of control risk—spanning prevention, monitoring, detection, containment, and enforcement—under the guidance of senior technical and risk leadership. Integrate safeguards across product and research surfaces in partnership with product, engineering, and research teams, helping ensure protections are consistent, low‑latency, and resilient as usage and model autonomy increase. Evaluate technical trade‑offs within the loss of control domain (coverage, robustness, latency, model utility, and operational complexity) and propose pragmatic, testable solutions. Collaborate closely with risk modeling, evaluations, and policy partners to align mitigation design with anticipated failure modes and high‑severity threat scenarios, including deceptive alignment, hidden subgoals, reward hacking, and attempts to evade oversight. Execute rigorous testing and red‑teaming workflows, helping stress‑test the mitigation stack against increasingly capable and potentially subversive model behaviors—such as sandbagging, monitor evasion, exploit‑seeking, unsafe tool use, or strategic deception—and iterate based on findings. You might thrive in this role if you: Have a passion for AI safety and are motivated to make cutting‑edge AI models safer for real‑world use. Bring demonstrated experience in deep learning and transformer models. Are proficient with frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow. Possess a strong foundation in data structures, algorithms, and software engineering principles. Are familiar with methods for training and fine‑tuning large language models, including distillation, supervised fine‑tuning, and policy optimization. Excel at working collaboratively with cross‑functional teams across research, policy, product, and engineering. Have significant experience designing and evaluating technical safeguards, control mechanisms, or monitoring systems for advanced AI behavior. (Nice to have) Bring background knowledge in alignment, control, interpretability, robustness, adversarial ML, or related fields. 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. 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. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via a link. 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. Compensation Range: $295K - $445K #J-18808-Ljbffr Slope