OpenAI

Researcher, Agent Safety, Training and Evaluations

OpenAI πŸ“ California, USA 🏒 On-site Posted Sep 3, 2026 via OpenAI careers
full-time πŸ“‚ Science & Research 🏒 On-site 🏭 Technology

✨ Job Highlights

  • β˜…Pay: $380,000 to $500,000 a year
  • β˜…On-site: California
  • β˜…Full-time role in science & research
  • β˜…Apply directly on OpenAI's careers site
  • β˜…Posted September 3, 2026

Full Job Description

Researcher, Agent Safety, Training and Evaluations job at OpenAI in California

There is a Researcher, Agent Safety, Training and Evaluations vacancy at OpenAI, and the role is based in California. It is a full-time position. The salary range published with the job is $380,000 to $500,000 a year.

The description below comes from OpenAI's own job posting.

About the Team

The Agent Safety team works to ensure that increasingly capable AI agents act safely, exercise sound judgment, and remain aligned with user intent. Our mission is to reduce the probability of severe unintended outcomes from increasingly capable AI agents while preserving their ability to act effectively and autonomously.

Our work spans three areas:

  • Training: Create training methods, environments and data that teach agents to make better decisions in consequential situations. We turn real-world failures into training signals that prevent similar incidents, and identify precursor behaviors and mitigations to address emerging risks.

  • Measurements: Build evaluations and production metrics that identify emerging risks and measure whether our interventions work.

  • Oversight: Develop oversight and system mitigation mechanisms that reduce harmful actions while preserving useful autonomy (for example future versions of auto-review).

  • About the Role
    We’re looking for strong executors with excellent judgment, comfort with ambiguity, and an understanding of frontier model research. You don’t need prior safety or alignment experience, we also welcome people that recently realized that alignment and safety is a critical area to contribute to.

    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

  • Train and evaluate frontier models to reduce harmful or misaligned agent actions, forming clear hypotheses and executing independently through ambiguity.

  • Mine incidents and build scalable measurement, data-processing, and evaluation systems that turn real failures into repeatable safety signals.

  • Collaborate closely with post-training, capabilities, oversight, and pre-training partners to ship research-backed mitigations into large-scale training and agent systems.

  • You might thrive in this role if you

  • Have demonstrated strength in research engineering, ML engineering, quantitative research, or applied model research, with the ability to own ambiguous projects end to end.

  • Bring excellent technical execution across experimentation, data, evaluation, and/or infrastructure, plus strong intuition for modern frontier-model research.

  • Are motivated by agent safety and eager to work on urgent, practical problems even if your prior work was outside safety or alignment.

  • 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.

    To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

    We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link .

    OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

    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.

    Common questions

    How much does this Researcher, Agent Safety, Training and Evaluations job pay?

    OpenAI advertises $380,000 to $500,000 a year for this role.

    Is the Researcher, Agent Safety, Training and Evaluations position remote?

    No, it is an on-site job in California.

    Where do I send my application to OpenAI?

    Use the apply button on this page. It takes you to OpenAI's own application form, so your CV goes directly to their hiring team.

    Is this job still open?

    OpenAI published the role on September 3, 2026. We check the employer's job board every day and take this page down when the role closes, so if you can read it, the job was still listed at our last check.

    Source: OpenAI careers page (jobs.ashbyhq.com). Applications go straight to the employer. We check the listing daily and remove it once it closes.

    🏒 About OpenAI

    OpenAI publishes its open roles on its own careers board. This page collects the OpenAI jobs that are live right now. Each listing links to OpenAI's application form, and we remove a listing once the employer closes it.

    Industry: Technology

    View Company Profile β†’
    $380,000 - $500,000 / yearly

    Yearly salary

    Apply on Company Site β†—
    🏒 Company OpenAI
    πŸ“ Location California, USA
    πŸ’Ό Job Type full-time
    🌐 Work Mode 🏒 On-site
    🏭 Industry Technology
    πŸ—“ Posted Date Sep 3, 2026
    πŸ”— Via OpenAI careers
    πŸ“… Deadline Dec 16, 2034

    About the Company

    OpenAI publishes its open roles on its own careers board. This page collects the OpenAI jobs that are live right…

    View Company β†’