Research Engineer, Codex
OpenAIRole Description & Requirements
About the Team
The Codex Research team creates the frontier agents OpenAI ships to the world. We are training the models behind our agents in Codex, ChatGPT, the API, and other frontier products: persistent, proactive intelligence that can operate computers, collaborate with people and other agents, and expand what people and organizations can imagine, attempt, and achieve.
We define what the next generation of agents should be able to do, build the training signal that teaches those abilities, and run the experiments that make them real. Our work spans coding, tool use, computer use, multi-agent coordination, long-horizon execution, factuality, instruction following, calibrated reasoning, and taste.
Our team is where new model capabilities get made. We build the data, environments, graders, training methods, and feedback loops that shape what OpenAI's next agents can do, then carry those capabilities through major training runs and into the products people use.
About the Role
As a member of the Codex Research team, you will improve the capabilities, reliability, and product fit of OpenAI's agentic models. You might own a research direction, build the infrastructure that makes large training runs faster and more trustworthy, create evals that reveal where models fail, or drive a capability from an idea through experimentation, integration, and launch.
This role is intentionally broad. The strongest candidates are not defined by one method or subfield; they are people who can take an ambiguous capability problem and make progress across research, engineering, data, evals, and product. You should be excited to work on models that act in the world: writing and debugging code, using tools, calling functions, operating computers, collaborating with other agents, and completing valuable work on behalf of users.
You will work with researchers, engineers, product teams, infrastructure teams, and safety/alignment partners to decide what should go into major model runs, measure whether it worked, and ship improvements into products used by real people. This is a high-agency role for people who want their work to land directly in frontier models.
In this role, you might:
Design and run experiments that improve agentic model behavior across coding, tool use, function calling, computer use, multi-agent collaboration, long-horizon tasks, factuality, instruction following, and calibrated reasoning.
Own end-to-end improvements to the post-training stack, including RL, data pipelines, graders, reward signals, evals, diagnostics, and model-behavior analysis.
Build evals and environments that expose the next set of model failures, then turn those failures into training data, product fixes, or new research directions.
Partner with Codex, API/platform, ChatGPT, and general-agent product teams to understand what users need and translate product signal into model improvements.
Work on early-training and alignment interventions, including data mixtures, objectives, synthetic data, and eval loops that shape downstream agent behavior.
Help decide which integrations, capabilities, and fixes are ready for inclusion in major model runs.
Improve the machinery for large-scale training and launch: experiment velocity, reliability, observability, reproducibility, cost, latency, and production readiness.
Take on cross-functional projects that touch model training, product infrastructure, and the production agent harness, such as multi-agent systems or training directly against production-like environments.
Debug hard failures in shipped or near-shipped models and turn messy qualitative behavior into concrete hypotheses, experiments, and fixes.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have strong technical fundamentals in machine learning, software engineering, systems, statistics, or a related field, and can learn quickly across the parts you have not worked in before.
Have hands-on experience with LLMs, RL, RLHF/RLAIF, post-training, evals, graders, synthetic data, model training, coding agents, tool-using agents, or production ML systems.
Are excited by open-ended problems where the path is unclear, the signal is noisy, and the right answer requires both research taste and engineering execution.
Care about product impact and model behavior, not just benchmark movement. You have opinions about what makes an agent useful, reliable, honest, tasteful, and easy to work with.
Can move from a vague behavioral problem to a concrete experiment: define the hypothesis, build the pipeline, run the model, analyze the result, and decide what to do next.
Are comfortable working across research, product, infrastructure, data, evals, and safety boundaries, and can communicate clearly with each group.
Like building load-bearing systems and processes when that is what the team needs, even if the work is not glamorous.
Want to train and ship the models that make agents genuinely useful for developers, enterprises, researchers, and everyday users.
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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