{"id":78997,"url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-re-rs-foundations-search","title":"Research Scientist / Research Engineer - Foundations, Search","company":{"id":2,"name":"OpenAI","domain":"openai.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/openai","size_band":"5000+","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"B","score":79,"open_postings":192,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.849,"repost_share":0.01,"time_to_fill_p50_days":52,"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"}},"role":"Data Science","role_family":"Data Science","seniority":null,"employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":380000,"max":850000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":850000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":null,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Contrastive Learning","optional":false},{"name":"Embeddings","optional":false},{"name":"Machine Learning","optional":false},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":false}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2025-06-16T22:35:00Z","employer_posted_date":"2025-06-16","last_verified_at":"2026-10-30T16:25:26Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":500,"trust":{"level":"stale","repost_count":0,"flags":["stale"],"days_open":499},"description":"About the Team\nThe Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models. Pushing the boundaries of data, scaling laws, optimization techniques, model architectures, and efficiency improvements to propel our science.\nThe Search team sits within Foundations, building agentic search by co-designing model-system interfaces with the core search stack (serving, indexing, retrieval) to translate model intent into reliable, real-world actions. Operating at the frontier of AI and information retrieval, the team develops large-scale systems that transform and index vast corpora, enabling models to reason over global knowledge and act dependably. In close partnership with researchers, we rapidly bring modeling breakthroughs into production and redefine how intelligent systems discover, retrieve, and synthesize information at planetary scale.\nAbout the Role\nWe’re looking for a researcher focused on our search efforts. You’ll work with a a team of world-class research scientists and engineers developing foundational technology that enables models to retrieve and condition on the right information, at the right time. This includes designing new embedding training objectives, scalable vector store architectures, and dynamic indexing methods.\nThis work will support retrieval across many OpenAI products and internal research efforts, with opportunities for scientific publication and deep technical impact.\nThis 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.\nResponsibilities\nTackle embedding models and retrieval systems optimized for grounding, relevance, and adaptive reasoning.\n\nCollaborate with a team of researchers and engineers building end-to-end infrastructure for training, evaluating, and integrating embeddings into frontier models.\n\nDrive innovation in dense, sparse, and hybrid representation techniques, metric learning, and learning-to-retrieve systems.\n\nCollaborate closely with Pretraining, Inference, and other Research teams to integrate retrieval throughout the model lifecycle\n\nContribute to OpenAI’s long-term vision of AI systems with memory and knowledge access capabilities rooted in learned representations.\n\nYou Might Thrive in This Role If You Have\nProven experience leading high-performance teams of researchers or engineers in ML infrastructure or foundational research.\n\nDeep technical expertise in representation learning, embedding models, or vector retrieval systems.\n\nFamiliarity with transformer-based LLMs and how embedding spaces can interact with language model objectives.\n\nResearch experience in areas such as contrastive learning, supervised or unsupervised embedding learning, or metric learning.\n\nA track record of building or scaling large machine learning systems, particularly embedding pipelines in production or research contexts.\n\nA first-principles mindset for challenging assumptions about how retrieval and memory should work for large models.\n\nAbout OpenAI\nOpenAI 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.\nWe 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.\nFor additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.\nBackground 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.\nTo notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.\nWe are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.\nOpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy\nAt 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5727,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":null,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Hybrid work","Relocation assistance"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":true,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Conversational AI","Generative Video","Code Intelligence"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-05T08:49:16Z"}],"visa":[{"country":"US","licensed_sponsor":true,"evidence":"H-1B filings in 12 months: 262 · green card filings: 3","filings_12m":262,"filings_prev_12m":114,"green_card_filings_12m":3,"median_offered_wage_usd":272217,"route":null,"cap_exempt":false,"checked_at":"2026-10-29T16:27:21+00:00","sources":["US Department of Labor: LCA disclosure data (H-1B, H-1B1, E-3)","US Department of Labor: PERM disclosure data (green cards)"],"filings_for_role_12m":30}],"liveness":{"score":2,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.061,"p_room":0.28,"age_days":500,"expected_fill_days":52,"reasons":["conf:2","stale_co","velocity","win:tail","crowd:brand"],"computed_at":"2026-10-30T05:48:23Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":850000,"is_top_pay":true},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-re-rs-foundations-search","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/openai-re-rs-foundations-search.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-30T18:12:16Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":7075,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-31T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":2},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=2"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fopenai-re-rs-foundations-search"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fopenai-re-rs-foundations-search"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fopenai-re-rs-foundations-search"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/openai-re-rs-foundations-search\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fopenai-re-rs-foundations-search"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":78997}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"openai.com","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":78997},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}