Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This role sits at the intersection of research and deployment, a combination that matters in modern SaaS where advanced models increasingly ship as product capabilities rather than lab outputs. The focus on robustness and safety training reflects a maturing part of the ecosystem: teams that treat safety constraints, misuse resistance, and policy alignment as core product requirements for widely used AI services.
For a SaaS career, the standout value is learning how research decisions translate into operational standards that can survive real customer traffic, adversarial behavior, and shifting regulatory expectations. Work that spans RLHF, adversarial training, and evaluation builds a toolkit that is transferable across AI-first SaaS companies, particularly those offering developer platforms or enterprise deployments where reliability and trust are purchasing criteria. The cross-functional touchpoints with legal, policy, and trust and safety also mirror how high-impact SaaS products are governed at scale.
The role best suits researchers who prefer applied impact alongside novel methods, and who are comfortable iterating based on deployment feedback rather than treating publication as the only output. It also fits professionals who enjoy setting technical direction and collaborating across disciplines to define what “safe enough to ship” means in practice.
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 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 Model Safety Research team aims to fundamentally advance our capabilities for precisely implementing robust, safe behavior in AI models, and to leverage these advances to make OpenAI’s deployed models safe and beneficial. This requires a breadth of new ML research to address the growing set of safety challenges as AI becomes more powerful and used in more settings. Key focus areas include how to enforce nuanced safety policies without trading off helpfulness and capabilities, how to make the model robust to adversaries, how to address privacy and security risks, and how to make the model trustworthy in safety-critical domains.
We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely.
About the Role
OpenAI is seeking a senior researcher with passion for AI safety and experience in safety research. Your role will set directions for research to enable and empower safe AGI and work on research projects to make our AI systems safer, more aligned and more robust to adversarial or malicious use cases. You will play a critical role in shaping how a safe AI system should look like in the future at OpenAI, making a significant impact on our mission to build and deploy safe AGI.
In this role, you will:
Conduct state-of-the-art research on AI safety topics such as RLHF, adversarial training, robustness, and more.
Implement new methods in OpenAI’s core model training and launch safety improvements in OpenAI’s products.
Set the research directions and strategies to make our AI systems safer, more aligned and more robust.
Coordinate and collaborate with cross-functional teams, including T&S, legal, policy and other research teams, to ensure that our products meet the highest safety standards.
Actively evaluate and understand the safety of our models and systems, identifying areas of risk and proposing mitigation strategies.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Are excited about OpenAI’s mission of building safe, universally beneficial AGI and are aligned with OpenAI’s charter
Demonstrate a passion for AI safety and making cutting-edge AI models safer for real-world use.
Bring 4+ years of experience in the field of AI safety, especially in areas like RLHF, adversarial training, robustness, fairness & biases.
Hold a Ph.D. or other degree in computer science, machine learning, or a related field.
Possess experience in safety work for AI model deployment
Have an in-depth understanding of deep learning research and/or strong engineering skills.
Are a team player who enjoys collaborative work environments.
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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