Software Engineer, AI Safety

About the Team

The Safety Systems team is dedicated to ensuring the safety, robustness, and reliability of AI models and their deployment in the real world. Learn more about OpenAI’s approach to safety. https://openai.com/safety/

Building on the many years of our practical alignment work and applied safety efforts, Safety Systems addresses emerging safety issues and develops new fundamental solutions to enable the safe deployment of our most advanced models and future AGI, to make AI that is beneficial and trustworthy.

About the Role

At OpenAI, we're dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence, and we know that creating a secure and reliable platform is vital to our mission. That's why we're seeking a software engineer to help us build out our trust and safety capabilities.

In this role, you'll work with our entire engineering team to design and implement systems that detect and prevent abuse, promote user safety, and reduce risk across our platform. You'll be at the forefront of our efforts to ensure that the immense potential of AI is harnessed in a responsible and sustainable manner.

Your Responsibilities:

- Architect, build, and maintain anti-abuse and content moderation infrastructure designed to protect us and end users from unwanted behavior.

- Work closely with our other engineers and researchers to utilize both industry standard and novel AI techniques to measure, monitor and improve AI models’ alignment to human values. .

- Diagnose and remediate active incidents on the platform and build new tooling and infrastructure that address the root causes of system failure.

You might thrive in this role if:

- You have built and run production services in a high growth, rapidly scaling environment.

- You can debug live issues and restore systems quickly.

- You have worked on content safety, fraud, or abuse, or are motivated and excited to work on present-day (“now-term”) AI safety. 

- You have experience with Python or with modern languages such as C++, Rust, or Go, and are able to quickly ramp up on Python.

- You understand the trade-offs of capabilities and risks and navigate them to deploy novel products and features safely. 

- You can critically assess risks of a new product or feature and devise innovative solutions to mitigate these risks without harming the product experience.

- You’re pragmatic. You know when to build a quick, good-enough fix, and when to invest in a robust, lasting solution.

- You possess strong project management skills. You are self-directed and can remove roadblocks to drive projects to completion with minimal guidance.

- You’ve deployed classifiers or machine learning models, or are excited to learn about modern ML infra.

Our tech stack

- Our infrastructure is built on Terraform, Kubernetes, Azure, Python, Postgres, and Kafka.

- While we value experience with these technologies, we are primarily looking for engineers with strong technical skills who understand the fundamental problems these tools solve, and can  quickly pick up new tools and frameworks. 

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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241.

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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.