Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Work on personalization and model behavior sits at the intersection of SaaS product design and applied AI research. This role is notable in the current SaaS ecosystem because it focuses on shaping how a widely used, subscription-style product behaves for individual users, where reliability, consistency, and user trust become product features rather than research artifacts. The team’s remit suggests a product-integrated research environment, with direct pathways from experimentation to real user experiences.
For a SaaS career, the long-term value comes from learning how to operationalize research in a production context. Building evaluations, training pipelines, and post-training methods maps closely to the “model-as-a-service” lifecycle, including iteration loops, quality measurement, and deployment constraints that many AI-enabled SaaS companies now face. Experience with reinforcement learning, reward modeling, and synthetic data also transfers to personalization, ranking, and adaptive UX problems across SaaS categories.
This role tends to suit professionals who enjoy pairing deep technical work with product outcomes, and who are comfortable moving between open-ended research questions and engineering rigor. It also fits candidates who like debugging large codebases and treating evaluation as a first-class deliverable, not an afterthought.
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 Personality & Model Behavior team, within OpenAI’s broader Personal AGI team conducts research on how to shape personalities and guide the behavior of models. We think about topics such as emotional intelligence, reasoning, and how models interact thoughtfully with users. We’re particularly interested in understanding how individual users want ChatGPT to behave, and creating personalized models that feel uniquely tailored to each user. We integrate this research into ChatGPT and other OpenAI products that are used by hundreds of millions of users.
About the Role
We're looking for individuals with strong ML engineering skills and research experience, especially with novel and highly capable models, and in areas like reinforcement learning and reward modeling. An ideal candidate is passionate about product-driven research.
In this role, you will:
Conduct research around personalization, personality, and model behavior by leveraging and developing tools such as synthetic data, reward modeling, and reinforcement learning.
Build robust evaluations and model training pipelines to facilitate our research.
Innovate new post-training methods.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have a deep understanding of machine learning and its applications.
Have prior knowledge in training and optimizing models and building evaluations.
Are willing to dive into large ML codebases to debug issues.
Thrive in dynamic and technically complex environments.
Have a track record of delivering innovative, out-of-the-box solutions to address real-world constraints.
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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