Researcher, Recursive Self-Improvement Safety

Compensation

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The salary range for this position is $295K – $445K, with generous equity, performance-related bonuses, 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
• 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

About the team

The Preparedness team is dedicated to addressing critical risks associated with frontier AI systems. Our work includes:

• Measurement: Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems
• Mitigation: Keeping misalignment safeguards, alignment tools, and on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future
• Coordination: Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI's preparedness framework and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets

About the role

As a Researcher, Recursive Self-Improvement Safety, you will focus on anticipating misalignment risks that might exist in the future but might not exist now. You will work on:

• Scalable oversight: Establishing practices for model misbehavior monitoring and oversight which remain effective in superhuman model capability regimes
• Automated auditing: Developing automated approaches for finding the most severe forms of model misalignments
• Rigorous monitorability: Testing and red-teaming of measurements of model misbehavior related to loss-of-control
• Model behavior science: Designing experiments and evaluations to understand the extent to which models are problematically misaligned
• Coordination and verification: Prototyping technical mechanisms for verifying compliance with potential future AI safety agreements
• AI R&D risk measurement: Tracking progress toward automation of technical staff to inform OpenAI's near-term investments in alignment and security
• Maintaining and strengthening RSI safety cases: Identifying and addressing blindspots of mitigation areas

In this role, you will:

• Carefully consider the problems OpenAI might face in the future and how to prepare for them
• Turn an open-ended objective into a concrete direction, prioritizing the work that is most useful to start right now
• Execute quickly, building scrappy prototypes, and then improving them iteratively until they become established components of our safety pipelines
• Secure buy-in from other staff at OpenAI when necessary, and communicate your work clearly
• Collaborate with or manage other staff as needed

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Are an exceptional technical executor
• Have strong strategic and research taste
• Are passionate about mitigating the risks associated with recursive self-improvement
• Are driven by a desire to do whatever work most positively impacts the future of AI development
• Have experience in one of the domains listed above (ML research, AI alignment, AI verification etc.)