OpenAI

Researcher, Alignment Training

OpenAI$130K — $180K *
Consumer Technology
5 - 7 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 5+ years of experience in large-scale ML with focus on model training, evaluation, or synthetic data
  • Expertise in designing experiments and data generation pipelines
  • Strong technical skills in pre-training and post-training interventions
  • Ability to analyze complex results with subtle signals
  • Excellent judgment in selecting research questions and trusting signals
  • Strong communication skills across multidisciplinary teams

Responsibilities

  • Develop synthetic data strategies to enhance models' behavioral tendencies
  • Investigate the impact of training phases on model performance
  • Design evaluation loops linking model behavior and training data
  • Create reusable pipelines for high-quality training data generation
  • Conduct experiments to differentiate durable behavior from transient gains
  • Collaborate with teams to apply research insights for improved model behavior
  • Shape the research agenda for alignment training and model evaluation

Benefits

  • Work in a pioneering field at the intersection of machine learning and AI alignment
  • Opportunity to influence the research agenda in an impactful area
  • Collaborative environment across diverse teams with varied expertise
  • Exposure to cutting-edge techniques in model training and evaluation
  • Focus on practical, application-driven research to enhance user experience
Full Job Description
About The Role

We're looking for a senior researcher with exceptional technical depth in large-scale model training, synthetic data, or evaluation who is excited to study how training choices shape aligned behavior in frontier models.

You will help shape the research agenda for alignment training: defining the behaviors we want models to learn, designing data and training interventions to teach them, and building the evaluation loops needed to tell whether those behaviors are broad, robust, and durable. The strongest candidates will be able to move from an ambiguous behavioral question to a concrete experimental program: formulate the hypothesis, design the intervention, build the pipeline, run the experiment, and decide whether the result is real.

This role is especially well suited for someone who wants to work close to the core model training loop, where choices about data, objectives, and evaluation directly shape how aligned deployed systems are.

In this role, you'll:
  • Develop synthetic data methods that teach models higher-level behavioral tendencies, such as understanding user intent, following instructions reliably, reasoning clearly, being honest, and acting consistently with intended goals and constraints.
  • Study how pre-training, mid-training, and post-training each shape downstream model behavior, and which interventions are best applied at which stage.
  • Build evaluation loops that connect model behavior back to training data and training objectives, so the team can iterate faster and with clearer signal.
  • Design reusable data generation and filtering pipelines that improve the quality, diversity, and robustness of training data.
  • Create experiments that distinguish durable learned behavior from benchmark gains, distribution-specific effects, or evaluation artifacts.
  • Collaborate across pre-training, post-training, alignment, and product-facing teams to translate research insights into better model behavior.
  • Help define the research agenda for alignment training: which behaviors should remain invariant across settings, which should adapt, and how to measure whether models have learned an underlying principle rather than a surface pattern.

You might thrive in this role if you:
  • Have a strong record of technically excellent work in large-scale ML, especially in pre-training, post-training, synthetic data, model evaluation, or training infrastructure.
  • Are comfortable designing experiments where the signal is subtle, noisy, or indirect.
  • Can move between research taste and engineering execution: forming hypotheses, building pipelines, running experiments, analyzing results, and turning findings into the next iteration.
  • Have unusually good judgment about which research questions are worth pursuing and which signals are strong enough to trust.
  • Care about making models more useful, honest, steerable, and reliable for real users.
  • Are excited by alignment problems, even if you have not worked in alignment before.
  • Communicate clearly across research, engineering, and product contexts.
  • Prefer practical, evidence-driven work grounded in experiments.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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