TL;DR

Research Engineer / Research Scientist (AI): Developing foundational technology for embedding retrieval, enabling models to retrieve and condition on relevant information with an accent on designing new embedding training objectives and scalable vector store architectures. Focus on innovation in representation techniques, metric learning, and integrating retrieval throughout the model lifecycle.

Location: Must be based in San Francisco, CA or willing to relocate. Hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week.

Salary: $445K – $555K + Offers Equity

Company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity.

What you will do

  • Tackle embedding models and retrieval systems optimized for grounding, relevance, and adaptive reasoning.
  • Collaborate with a team of researchers and engineers building end-to-end infrastructure for training, evaluating, and integrating embeddings into frontier models.
  • Drive innovation in dense, sparse, and hybrid representation techniques, metric learning, and learning-to-retrieve systems.
  • Collaborate closely with Pretraining, Inference, and other Research teams to integrate retrieval throughout the model lifecycle.
  • Contribute to OpenAI’s long-term vision of AI systems with memory and knowledge access capabilities rooted in learned representations.

Requirements

  • Proven experience leading high-performance teams of researchers or engineers in ML infrastructure or foundational research.
  • Deep technical expertise in representation learning, embedding models, or vector retrieval systems.
  • Familiarity with transformer-based LLMs and how embedding spaces can interact with language model objectives.
  • Research experience in areas such as contrastive learning, supervised or unsupervised embedding learning, or metric learning.
  • A track record of building or scaling large machine learning systems, particularly embedding pipelines in production or research contexts.

Culture & Benefits

  • Push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products.
  • Be part of an equal opportunity employer that values the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
  • Contribute to AI development with safety and human needs at its core.