Researcher, Pretraining Safety

Benefits

Parental leave

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Non-birth-parent leave

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Family-building benefits

• Fertility benefits: Not verified
• Adoption assistance: Not verified
• Surrogacy assistance: Not verified

Mental health support

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Relocation assistance

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Childcare support

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Learning budget

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Verification

Not verified checked Jun 7, 2026

Salary

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401(k) match

Reported from DOL Form 5500 industry filing (not employer-specific)

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Market context

U.S. role benchmark (BLS OEWS)

$116,543 U.S. median for this role

Projected growth (BLS Employment Projections)

+9.8% - Much faster than average

Matched to SOC 15-1252 - Software Engineering aggregate by role bucket.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS, May 2024 and Employment Projections, 2024-2034.

Role

Role function

Engineering From the posting source checked Jun 20, 2026

Seniority

Mid From the posting source checked Jun 20, 2026

Schedule

Shift type

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Weekend work

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Application

Cover letter

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Assessment

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Deadline

Not stated

Where they hire

State eligibility is not yet verified.

About this role

Researcher, Pretraining Safety San Francisco, California, United States About the Team The Safety Systems team is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit the society and is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency. The Pretraining Safety team's goal is to build safer, more capable base models and enable earlier, more reliable safety evaluation during training. We aim to: - Develop upstream safety evaluations that to monitor how and when unsafe behaviors and goals emerge; - Create safer priors through targeted pretraining and mid-training interventions that make downstream alignment more effective and efficient - Design safe-by-design architectures that allow for more controllability of model capabilities In addition, we will conduct the foundational research necessary for understanding how behaviors emerge, generalize, and can be reliably measured throughout training. About the Role The Pretraining Safety team is pioneering how safety is built into models before they reach post-training and deployment. In this role, you will work throughout the full stack of model development with a focus on pre-training: - Identify safety-relevant behaviors as they first emerge in base models - Evaluate and reduce risk without waiting for full-scale training runs - Design architectures and training setups that make safer behavior the default - Strengthen models by incorporating richer, earlier safety signals We collaborate across OpenAI's safety ecosystem-from Safety Systems to

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