Software Engineer, Model Behavior
OpenAI
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Department
Research
Compensation
- $255K – $405K • Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience.
In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity and benefits.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family
Mental health and wellness support
401(k) plan with 50% matching
Generous time off, many company holidays, and multiple coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge.
Paid parental leave (24 weeks paid birth-parent leave & 20-week paid parental leave) and family-planning support
Annual learning & development stipend ($1,500 per year)
About the Team
The Model Behavior team shapes how our models interact with people. We view the model as the product itself, aiming to create intuitive experiences that exceed user expectations and feel like magic.
The team partners closely with research and product teams across the company to improve the real-world usefulness of our models at scale. Our work directly impacts hundreds of millions of users globally and contributes to OpenAI's mission of broadly distributing safe AI.
About the Role
We are looking for a full-stack engineer with experience in observability, tooling, and data pipelines to capture, aggregate, and surface production signals about human–model interactions. You will build systems to understand and act on (1) how users engage with our models and (2) where our models fall short, and develop robust evaluations to define and track improvements in model behavior. These signals power our understanding of real-world model performance and can be captured in creative ways beyond standard logging and metrics, requiring both technical skill and product intuition.
This role requires working across the stack — from building front-ends to surface & visualize insights to debugging back-end pipelines — and collaborating with cross-functional teams to ship iteratively under tight deadlines. You should thrive in scrappy environments, quickly prototype solutions, and care deeply about end-user experience and aesthetics.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of three days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Do the highest-leverage work to improve models for users at scale
Build systems to understand and act on (1) how users engage with our models and (2) where our models fall short from delivering the best experiences for our users
Develop robust evaluations to define and track improvements in model behavior
Rapidly prototype and develop tooling, dashboards, and visualizations for researchers and applied teams
Design, implement, test, and debug code across the research and product stack
Build and maintain robust telemetry, logging, and data pipelines to support production-scale model evaluation
Collaborate across research, safety, infrastructure, and product teams to deliver solutions that improve model efficiency and user experience
Own and support experiments that validate hypotheses around model behavior
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have experience building and maintaining full-stack observability tooling
Have built evaluations for capability and model improvements
Enjoy owning 0→1 user-facing products or tools, ideally in a startup or fast-moving environment
Ship quickly under competing priorities and tight deadlines
Understand how evaluations work and are curious about model training and iteration
Care about product polish, usability, and interface aesthetics
Collaborate effectively across teams and take on diverse tasks to move work forward
Are a team player, willing to do a variety of tasks that move the team forward
Bonus: understand AI/ML workloads and have experience building evaluation systems for them
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.
Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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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.
Compensation Range: $255K - $405K