Researcher, Safety Training

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:

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