Software Engineer, Research - Human Data

Department: Research

Location: San Francisco

Compensation: $230K – $385K • Offers Equity • Multiple Ranges

Employment Type: FullTime

About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. A key part of achieving that mission is training models that deeply understand and reflect human preferences — the Human Data team is at the heart of that effort.

The Human Data engineering team creates the systems that enable scalable, high-quality human feedback. These systems are essential to how OpenAI trains and improves its most advanced models. Engineers on this team collaborate closely with world-class researchers to bring alignment techniques to life — from experimental ideas to production-ready feedback loops.

About the Role

We’re looking for software engineers to join the Human Data team and build the platforms, prototypes, tools, and infrastructure that power how our AI models are trained, aligned, and evaluated. You’ll partner with researchers and cross-functional teams to bring alignment ideas to life, influence future model training, and shape how models interact with the real world.

We’re looking for people who are excited by technical ownership, enjoy working across the stack, and are eager to solve ambiguous problems in a high-impact, fast-paced environment.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Build and maintain robust full-stack systems for feedback collection, data labeling, and evaluation pipelines, while maintaining high levels of security.

• Translate experimental alignment research into scalable production infrastructure, including inference and model training stacks.

• Design and iterate on user-facing tools and backend services to support high-quality data workflows

• Partner with researchers, engineers, and program leads to shape feedback loops and model interaction paradigms

• Drive infrastructure improvements that enable faster iteration and scaling across OpenAI’s frontier models, from internal research tooling all the way to production ChatGPT.
  

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production systems at scale

• Enjoy full-stack development with end-to-end ownership — from backend pipelines to user interfaces

• Are motivated by high-impact collaboration with research teams and solving novel, ambiguous problems

• Are excited to shape how AI systems learn from human preferences and reflect a broad range of human values

• Care deeply about inclusive tooling and building systems that enhance model safety, reliability, and usefulness

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity. 

We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.

For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.

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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.