Research Engineer, Notifications

About the Team

The ChatGPT team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to the world.

We seek to learn from deployment and broadly distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. We aim to make our innovative tools globally accessible, transcending geographic, economic, or platform barriers. Our commitment is to facilitate the use of AI to enhance lives, fostered by rigorous insights into how people use our products.

About the Role

We are looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to join our Notifications team, focused on building and scaling intelligent notification systems that provide real value to users even when they are not actively on the product. This role will be central to shaping how ChatGPT communicates proactively and helpfully with users—surfacing the right content, at the right time, through the right channel.

You will work on designing and implementing ranking and recommendation systems that leverage both classical ML techniques and large language models (LLMs) to optimize notification relevance, timeliness, and user experience. The ideal candidate has strong ML fundamentals, experience shipping ranking or recommendation systems in production, exposure to LLMs, and sharp product intuition. You should be comfortable operating across research and product boundaries: thinking from first principles, running rigorous experiments, and building scalable systems.

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.

In this role, you will:

• Design and build end-to-end ranking and recommendation systems for notifications, from modeling to evaluation and deployment.

• Apply and adapt LLMs to ranking problems, including prompt-based approaches and fine-tuning.

• Develop experiments to evaluate notification relevance, user value, and long-term impact, working closely with product, data science, and engineering teams.

• Collaborate with research teams to leverage the latest modeling techniques while balancing practical constraints of production systems.

• Build robust offline and online evaluations to measure system improvements and user outcomes.

• Contribute to the broader Growth ML stack and help set technical direction for intelligent user engagement systems.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have hands-on experience building and deploying ranking, recommendation, or personalization systems at scale.

• Have a deep understanding of machine learning and its applications, with exposure to LLMs and their integration into product experiences.

• Are experienced in experimentation, A/B testing, and analyzing impact on user behavior and business metrics.

• Are comfortable diving into large ML codebases, designing evaluations, and debugging complex modeling issues.

• Thrive in dynamic, fast-changing environments and can think from first principles to design elegant solutions.

• Have strong product intuition and can balance modeling sophistication with product impact.

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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