RE/RS, Data Understanding - Foundations

We're looking to advance how OpenAI builds and understands pretraining data at scale. You'll treat data quality and curation as core research problems: developing new methods to select, combine, and transform data; creating datasets that improve model capabilities; and designing rigorous experiments to understand how data choices and interventions affect model learning and downstream behavior. You'll work closely with frontier models and web-scale data to build evidence for which approaches work and why, then translate successful research into scalable data processing pipelines

• Have a strong track record of new or improved ML ideas, through publications, projects, or applied research.
• Own and drive a research agenda, from choosing the right problems to carrying long-running work through to impact.
• Be excited by OpenAI's empirical, collaborative approach to research.

Nice To Have

• Thoughtfulness about AI's impact, including privacy, provenance, and data quality.
• Experience building high-performance deep learning or large-scale data processing systems.

$445K - $555K medical insurance, dental insurance, vision insurance, parental leave, paid time off, paid holidays, 401(k), retirement plan United States, California, San Francisco May 29, 2026

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., 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.