Researcher, Pretraining Safety

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Safety Systems

Compensation

• $295K – $445K • Offers Equity

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 team is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit the society and is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency.

The Pretraining Safety team’s goal is to build safer, more capable base models and enable earlier, more reliable safety evaluation during training. We aim to:

1. Develop upstream safety evaluations that to monitor how and when unsafe behaviors and goals emerge;

1. Create safer priors through targeted pretraining and mid-training interventions that make downstream alignment more effective and efficient

1. Design safe-by-design architectures that allow for more controllability of model capabilities

In addition, we will conduct the foundational research necessary for understanding how behaviors emerge, generalize, and can be reliably measured throughout training.

About the Role

The Pretraining Safety team is pioneering how safety is built into models before they reach post-training and deployment. In this role, you will work throughout the full stack of model development with a focus on pre-training:

• Identify safety-relevant behaviors as they first emerge in base models

• Evaluate and reduce risk without waiting for full-scale training runs

• Design architectures and training setups that make safer behavior the default

• Strengthen models by incorporating richer, earlier safety signals

We collaborate across OpenAI’s safety ecosystem—from Safety Systems to Training—to ensure that safety foundations are robust, scalable, and grounded in real-world risks.

In this role, you will:

• Develop new techniques to predict, measure, and evaluate unsafe behavior in early-stage models

• Design data curation strategies that improve pretraining priors and reduce downstream risk

• Explore safe-by-design architectures and training configurations that improve controllability

• Introduce novel safety-oriented loss functions, metrics, and evals into the pretraining stack

• Work closely with cross-functional safety teams to unify pre- and post-training risk reduction

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience developing or scaling pretraining architectures (LLMs, diffusion models, multimodal models, etc.)

• Are comfortable working with training infrastructure, data pipelines, and evaluation frameworks (e.g., Python, PyTorch/JAX, Apache Beam)

• Enjoy hands-on research — designing, implementing, and iterating on experiments

• Enjoy collaborating with diverse technical and cross-functional partners (e.g., policy, legal, training)

• Are data-driven with strong statistical reasoning and rigor in experimental design

• Value building clean, scalable research workflows and streamlining processes for yourself and others

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.

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