Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Retrieval and search sit at the center of how modern SaaS products turn large model capabilities into usable workflows, particularly for API platforms and conversational interfaces. Featuring a Research Engineer focused on these systems highlights a core layer of the current SaaS stack: connecting users to relevant knowledge across documents, enterprise sources, and web scale content in ways that can be shipped reliably.
The career signal here is the blend of applied research and production deployment. Work that spans algorithm design, evaluation, and rollout into customer facing surfaces builds durable SaaS experience in iteration loops, quality measurement, and operating ML backed features over time. It also develops fluency in the practical constraints that shape search experiences, including latency, relevance tradeoffs, and data store choices that recur across AI enabled SaaS products.
This role tends to suit engineers who prefer owning ambiguous problems end to end and partnering closely across research, engineering, and product disciplines. It is a strong match for professionals who want their technical decisions to translate into shipped capabilities, and who are motivated by improving real world retrieval performance rather than optimizing in isolation.
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
We bring OpenAI's technology to the world through products like ChatGPT and the OpenAI API.
We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.
About the Role
We are looking for an experienced Research Engineer to work on retrieval & search problems across our API and ChatGPT. As the AI landscape has evolved over the last few years, retrieval & search have emerged as key use cases for our models, and we are investing in ensuring that we can offer these search-based product experiences for our users. You will be at the center of our retrieval & search efforts as a company, and the progress you drive here will reach millions of end users.
In this role, you will:
Work on retrieval & search algorithms and methodologies in close collaboration with our research team, including problems in such domains as document search, enterprise search, knowledge retrieval, and web-scale search.
Deploy these search methodologies into production in both the API and ChatGPT to be used by millions of end users.
Explore novel research topics in retrieval & search that may inform our product strategy in the medium and long term.
Partner with researchers, engineers, product managers, and designers to bring new features and research capabilities to the world
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have extensive prior experience building and maintaining production machine learning systems.
Have prior experience working with vector databases, search indices, or other data stores for search and retrieval use cases
Have prior experience building and iterating on internet-scale search systems
Own problems end-to-end, and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done
Have the ability to move fast in an environment where things are sometimes loosely defined and may have competing priorities or deadlines
.
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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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.
