Research Engineer, Human Data

About the Team

The Human Data team turns human feedback into reliable signals for training and evaluation. We design and run end-to-end programs that capture the depth of human intent behind everyday and high-stakes uses of our models. Our remit spans bespoke data campaigns, scalable synthetic data generation, and product-embedded signals. We partner closely across all research teams to translate these signals into training datasets, novel evaluations, and feedback loops that push the frontier of our models and advance their applications.

About the Role

As a Research Engineer on Human Data, your mission will be to invent and ship novel systems that maximize the utility of human feedback at the capability and deployment frontiers. You’ll create new ways to capture and weight explicit feedback, decode implicit signals from our products, and extract deeper insights from every bit of supervision. We’re looking for people who pair first-principles curiosity with strong engineering ability and bias to impact.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of at least 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Partner with researchers and the Human Data product manager to design, derisk, and implement 0-to-1 innovations in all aspects of human feedback.

• Uncover new insights on our AI trainers and users alike, and apply these findings to OpenAI’s research goals.

• Measure the efficacy of our existing feedback methods, and experiment to increase that efficacy.

• Design methods that precisely capture human feedback across subjective, context-dependent goals and evolve with how people actually use our models.

• Ensure our evaluations accurately track real-world utility and evolve with how people use our models and applications.

• Run online and offline experiments that quantify your downstream causal impact on model performance.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Constantly think about how to do things better, and don’t shirk away from impactful ideas because they’re difficult.

• Have experience with machine learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch) and are comfortable experimenting with large-scale models.

• Are goal-oriented instead of method-oriented, and are not afraid of tedious but high-value work when needed.

• Enjoy moving fluidly between high-level research questions and low-level implementation details, adapting methods to solve ambiguous, dynamic problems.

• Are motivated by OpenAI’s mission and want to both unlock breakthrough capabilities and improve everyday use cases.

• Bring exceptional grit and creative problem-solving with an action-oriented, deeply curious, hands-on mindset.

• Unblock yourself when external dependencies slow you down, and find paths to partial success in the interim.

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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