Researcher, Safety Training

Job description

ABOUT THE TEAM Safety Research at OpenAI is responsible for ensuring our most capable models can be safely deployed in the real world. The Safety Training team develops the research and engineering methods that shape model behavior through post-training, reinforcement learning, evaluation, and deployment feedback. Our work focuses on making models helpful, reliable, and aligned with safety policies across model types, modalities, and product surfaces. We work across both longer-term safety research and the core post-training work needed to improve production models. ABOUT THE ROLE We are seeking researchers to advance safety training for OpenAI’s models. You will develop methods that improve model behavior after pretraining, including RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, preference optimization, adversarial training, synthetic data generation, safety evaluations, and model behavior analysis. This role is highly cross-functional. You will work with core training teams, product teams, policy, legal, trust and safety, and domain experts to identify risks, design interventions, train models, evaluate outcomes, and launch safety improvements in OpenAI products. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: - Conduct research on safety post-training methods, including RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, reward modeling, adversarial training, synthetic data, and scalable oversight - Develop and implement model training interventions that make models safer, more reliable, and more aligned with user intent - Build evaluations and measurement infrastructure for safety harms, high-stakes reliability failures, policy adherence, jailbreak robustness, multimodal risks, agent behavior, and domain-specific risks - Translate ambiguous safety problems into concrete research plans, datasets, training runs, evals, and product-facing improvements - Analyze model failures such as hallucination, unsafe tool use, prompt injection, privacy leakage, over-refusal, under-refusal, sycophancy, and deceptive or misleading behavior - Partner with domain experts to design safety training approaches for areas like cyber, privacy, youth safety, wellbeing, and other frontier-risk domains - Collaborate with research and deployment teams to ensure safety improvements are incorporated into OpenAI’s core model training and product launches YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - Have hands-on experience training, fine-tuning, or post-training language models, multimodal models, or agentic systems - Have experience with RL, RLHF, RLAIF, DPO, PPO, reward modeling, preference optimization, instruction tuning, or related post-training methods - Care deeply about shaping model behavior in real-world systems, not only publishing research - Are excited by open-ended safety problems where the right method, dataset, eval, or training objective may not be obvious at the start - Bring strong research judgment and strong engineering ability, including comfort running experiments, analyzing model behavior, and working with large-scale ML systems - Have experience in one or more relevant domains: agents, tool use, multimodal models, cyber/security, reliability, uncertainty calibration, factuality, evals, privacy, youth safety, wellbeing, or applied alignment - Enjoy collaborating across research, engineering, product, policy, legal, and trust and safety teams - Hold a PhD in machine learning, computer science, or a related field, or have equivalent practical research or engineering experience NICE TO HAVE: - Experience improving production model behavior through post-training or deployment feedback - Experience building safety evals, automated graders, red-teaming systems, or monitoring pipelines - Experience working with human feedback, expert feedback, synthetic data, or policy-grounded training data - Experience in safety-critical or abuse-sensitive domains where models must balance helpfulness, refusal, uncertainty, and user intent 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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf. Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with