Research Engineer / Research Scientist / AI Systems Engineer, RSI

OpenAI • San Francisco, CA

3d • $295,000 - $445,000 • Onsite

About The Position

The Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) team at OpenAI works across research, engineering, product, and infrastructure to build AI systems that accelerate and ultimately conduct high-quality research. The team focuses on automating real research workflows and improving research productivity by building systems and feedback loops, designing evaluations, and training models to develop missing capabilities. Their work spans the full lifecycle of model training, evaluation, and deployment to help researchers move faster and tackle increasingly ambitious problems. This role is based in San Francisco, CA.

Requirements

• Research or engineering experience across LLM training, model evaluations, agent systems, synthetic data, research infrastructure, or large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong generalist who can move between open-ended research and practical implementation, turning ambiguous problems into clear results.
• Ability to collaborate effectively across the full stack, including systems, data, model training, evaluations, and other research teams.
• Comfortable building and maintaining the data pipelines, tooling, and infrastructure needed to support emerging AI capabilities.
• Comfortable working on problems without clear definitions or established playbooks.
• Ability to think rigorously about scientific quality, research taste, safety, privacy, reliability, performance, and scale.
• Excited about using increasingly capable AI systems to accelerate meaningful research.

Responsibilities

• Design evaluations for research judgment, hypothesis generation and testing, and long-horizon experiment execution.
• Turn real research workflows and model failures into data and evaluation flywheels.
• Improve model research capabilities through agent harnesses, synthetic data, RL environments, and model training.
• Build and maintain safe, reliable integrations between our models and OpenAI’s research infrastructure.
• Develop research agents, experiment-orchestration systems, and sandboxed runtimes that support real research workflows.
• Create metrics and economic models to understand RSI’s current and future effects on research productivity, model capabilities, and the safety of internal deployments.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed