Senior Research Engineer/Software Engineer (Deployment)

About the Team:

The Deployment Planning team’s mandate is to build tools and conduct research that equip OpenAI to prepare for safe and successful deployment of increasingly advanced AI. In pursuit of this goal, we do the following:

Design, inform, and implement novel technical and non-technical tools for model evaluation, mitigation, and safer deployment.

Conduct and publish research on variables of particular concern for the deployment of increasingly powerful AI systems.

Our team’s work involves working “upstream” before models are trained. It also includes working “downstream” to understand the societal implications and deployment critical features of trained models and to identify and build appropriate deployment strategy, safety mitigations, tools, and alignment efforts, in partnership with Product and Research. 

About the Role:

We are looking for self-starter engineers with full-stack experience.

In this role, you will closely collaborate with our world-class research teams to build and deploy powerful AI systems and products that can perform previously impossible tasks and achieve unprecedented levels of performance. You'll have the opportunity to work on different parts of the AI development and deployment pipeline for OpenAI’s models. You will get to work on projects ranging from pre-deployment to post-deployment, such as pre-training data interventions, robust model evaluations, and tools for controlling model outputs.

As a Senior Engineer, you will work on high impact projects from day one, working cross-functionally with many other research, product and non-engineering teams. You'll prototype, experiment and build effective interventions that improve the impact of our models. 

If you enjoy owning the most important problems end-to-end and have high curiosity and willingness to pick up whatever knowledge is missing to get the job done, you will find our work here uniquely challenging and rewarding.

A glance at some of our engineering projects:

• Design, develop, and maintain the tools & infrastructure required for a variety of cutting-edge AI research and consumer projects.
• Design and build effective metrics for measuring the performance of our models.
• Ideate and build tools/interventions tackling challenges such as hate speech, and disinformation in generative models.

We Expect You To:

• Have a Bachelor’s/Master’s degree in computer science or equivalent
• Have strong engineering skills, such as system design, front/backend systems, reliability, debugging
• Have proficiency in Python, JavaScript and/or other programming languages
• Have demonstrated interest in and thoughtfulness about the impacts of AI technology (see our Charter for examples of our goals)
• Have experience in technical leadership, leading project teams, and setting technical direction
• Have experience in machine learning, writing bug-free machine learning code and building the science behind the models deployed
• Be comfortable working cross functionally across both research and product teams
• Have expertise to function independently 

Responsibilities:

• Prototype approaches for measurement of AI systems and mitigation of societal impact from AI deployment
• Work with downstream product and infrastructure teams to build and scale effective tools for responsible deployment
• Work with research to test and build model level interventions
• Guide growth of the engineering function of the Deployment Planning team
• Architect and develop contextual interventions that improve real world impact

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. 

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.

Benefits and Perks

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family
• Mental health and wellness support
• 401(k) plan with 4% matching 
• Unlimited time off and 18+ company holidays per year 
• Paid parental leave (20 weeks) and family-planning support
• Annual learning & development stipend ($1,500 per year)

We are an equal opportunity employer and do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or other legally protected statuses. Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via accommodation@openai.com.