As a Senior Trait Definition Scientist, you will work with a diverse set of teams and data inputs to develop roadmaps that deliver meaningful impact of gene editing for crop improvement, leveraging some of the industry's most extensive and global agriculture and genetic datasets.

Your primary responsibilities will include:

• Developing and documenting recommendations for trait targets for gene editing that are guided by business impact and aligned with product and portfolio needs.
• Guiding connectivity between germplasm development targets and gene editing priorities to ensure that editing strategies translate into improved seeds and traits.
• Developing robust workflows that enable cross-team communication, decision making, and iterative prioritization to shape research direction and resource allocation.
• Identifying novel opportunities to utilize gene editing to impact the development of new seeds and traits products, leveraging emerging science and data-driven insights.
• Leading or assisting in the gathering, curation, quality control, and analysis of new data sources (e.g., functional genomics, phenomics) across Research and Development (R&D) teams.
• Actively building and expanding networks within the Crop Genome Editing team and across functions, serving as a consultant to leadership and partners in your area of expertise.
• Contributing to the Biology and Genome Design community by continuously developing your own capabilities and sharing best practices, tools, and learnings with colleagues.

To be successful in this role, you will need to possess a PhD in Biological Sciences, Plant Breeding, Plant Sciences, Genetics, Developmental Biology, or a related field, and at least 4 years of post-PhD experience working in gene editing, germplasm improvement, or closely related fields.

You will also need to have excellent communication skills with fluency in English, both written and verbal, and experience defining the collection, organization, analysis, and use of complex biological datasets and translating them into testable hypotheses.

Additional compensation may include a bonus or incentive compensation (if relevant).

This posting will be available for application until at least April 20, 2026.

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Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Scaling

Compensation

• $250K – $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.

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.

About the Team

The Frontier Systems team at OpenAI builds, launches, and supports the largest supercomputers in the world that OpenAI uses for its most cutting-edge model training.

We take data center designs, turn them into real, working systems and build any software needed for running large-scale frontier model trainings.

Our mission is to bring up, stabilize and keep these hyperscale supercomputers reliable and efficient during the training of the frontier models.

About the Role

On the Frontier Systems team, you’ll build critical infrastructure that keeps our supercomputers running reliably for cutting-edge AI research. Even a single hardware failure can derail a large-scale training run, so minimizing disruptions is core to the mission.

Engineers here own their work end-to-end and are trusted to make a real impact. This role is for someone who goes deep - who thrives on root-causing system-level issues and building automation to catch and fix problems at scale.

In this role, you will:

• Own and improve the system health checks that keep our hyperscale supercomputers stable during model training.

• Lead deep dives into hardware failures and system-level bugs to understand how things break at scale.

• Build automation that monitors and fixes issues across thousands of machines - so researchers can keep moving without interruption.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

• 7+ years of industry experience in software engineering

• Proficiency with Python and shell scripting

• A high degree of comfort digging into noisy data with SQL, PromQL, and Pandas or any other tool necessary

• Experience developing reproducible analyses

• A balance of strengths in building and operationalizing

Prior hardware expertise is not required for this role.

Bonus if you have:

• Experience with low level details of hardware components, protocols, and associated Linux tooling (e.g., PCIe, Infiniband, networking, power management, kernel perf tuning)

• Experience with visualization of large data centers and networks.

• Expertise with network operations and tooling

• Expertise with power management and stabilization

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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