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.