Domain Researcher
OpenAI
Location
San Francisco
Employment Type
Full time
Location Type
On-site
Department
Research
Compensation
- $210K – $250K • Offers Equity
The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.
Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
401(k) retirement plan with employer match
Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
Mental health and wellness support
Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
Relocation support for eligible employees
Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.
More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.
This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.
About the Team
The Strategic Deployment team makes frontier models more capable, reliable, and aligned to transform high-impact domains. We work with customers and product teams to pinpoint reliability gaps, build targeted training data, and develop evaluation methods that directly improve model performance. Insights from these deployments feed back into advancing model science and engineering.
As a Domain Researcher, you’ll combine applied research with deep customer and product collaboration to make our models excel in specific domains. You’ll identify shortcomings in real-world use, craft high-quality training data to address them, and apply fine-tuning and evaluation techniques to deliver measurable improvements.
This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We follow a hybrid model (3 days/week in-office) and offer relocation support.
In this role, you will:
Partner with customers and product to diagnose capability gaps and define reliability goals.
Create and curate domain-specific training data to improve model behavior.
Build evaluations and infrastructure to track and accelerate improvements.
Apply fine-tuning, RL, and data-driven methods to boost domain performance.
Deploy advances in high-stakes, real-world environments.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Care about delivering reliable AI performance in critical domains.
Have experience with fine-tuning, RL, or high-quality data construction.
Bring strong engineering skills for building and optimizing AI systems.
Excel in open-ended, high-feedback problem spaces.
Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
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: $210K - $250K