Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Senior Research Engineer/Scientist role sits at the intersection of applied ML research and product-facing delivery—an increasingly important lane in SaaS as AI capabilities move from lab demos into consumer software. The emphasis on edge and device constraints signals work that is shaped by real deployment limits (latency, compute, power), not just benchmark performance, which is where many AI-enabled SaaS products differentiate.
For a SaaS career, the standout value is learning how to translate frontier modeling into capabilities that can be built on top of—work that tends to influence product roadmaps, platform decisions, and reliability expectations downstream. Experience training and evaluating multimodal models, iterating on architectures under strict constraints, and collaborating across research and design maps well to modern SaaS organizations shipping AI features at scale, where model quality and user experience are tightly coupled.
This position is best suited to professionals who enjoy rigorous experimentation, performance-minded engineering, and close collaboration with specialists (including kernel engineers) without needing to own every layer. It will fit someone comfortable operating between exploratory research and practical implementation, and motivated by turning early technical advances into repeatable building blocks for product teams.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team
The Consumer Products Research team is an Applied Research team focused on developing new methods and models to support our vision for the future of computing as we advance forward in our mission of building AGI that benefits all of humanity.
About the Role
As a Research Engineer/Scientist on the Consumer Products Research team, you will work together with both the best ML researchers in the world and the greatest design talent of our generation to push the frontier of model capabilities.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We follow a hybrid model with 4 days a week in the office and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role you will:
Train and evaluate multimodal SoTA models along axis that are important to our vision for future devices.
Develop novel architectures that improve model performance when scaling the models themselves is not an option.
Run through the necessary walls to take nascent research capabilities and turn them into capabilities we can build on top of.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have a research background in adapting transformers to run in environments with significantly less compute than traditional GPUs and datacenter accelerators.
Love performance optimization and working with GPU kernel engineers (but you do not need CUDA experience yourself).
Do rigorous science (rather than vibes based). We need confidence in the experiments we run to move quickly.
Have already spent time in the weeds teaching models to speak and perceive.
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.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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