Researcher, Alignment CoT Monitorability

Alignment - San Francisco

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About the Team

The CoT Monitorability team at OpenAI studies whether and when the chain-of-thought of frontier reasoning models is monitorable enough to support scalable oversight. We study how to measure monitorability, which training mechanisms affect monitorability, and speculative methods to improve monitorability. While we mostly focus on CoT monitorability at the moment, we care more generally about any form of monitorability, auditing methods, and improving alignment.

We were the first to show that chain-of-thought monitoring can be a practical additional safety mechanism, and today our monitoring systems are actively used on OpenAI’s largest RL training runs to detect misbehavior. The issues we surface are then used to help improve our reward functions, environments, etc (without directly training against a CoT monitor).

Our work sits in Alignment and intersects with model training, alignment evaluations, monitoring, and frontier-risk research.We care most about monitorability where the stakes are high, and about preserving useful oversight signals as models become more capable.

About the Role

We’re looking for a researcher with strong empirical ML expertise and a deep interest in model behavior, alignment, or interpretability. Direct chain-of-thought interpretability experience is welcome but not required; strong candidates may come from broader interpretability, alignment, model training, or investigative model-behavior work.

As a researcher on the Alignment team, you will design and run experiments that improve our understanding of model monitorability. You will investigate how training interventions across the model-development pipeline influence whether reasoning remains legible, build evaluations that make those questions measurable, and help translate findings into practical oversight and training recommendations. You may also help develop new monitoring models or methods and apply them to OpenAI’s largest training runs.

This role is especially well suited for someone who can move from an ambiguous model-behavior question to a concrete experimental setup: formulate the hypothesis, build the evaluation or intervention, run the experiment, analyze the result, and decide what the evidence supports. 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:

Design and run empirical studies of chain-of-thought monitorability across frontier reasoning models and training settings.
Build evaluations that measure whether monitors can reliably predict properties of interest, including high-stakes forms of misbehavior.
Investigate how pre-training, synthetic data, mid-training, post-training, reinforcement learning, and other interventions improve or degrade monitorability.
Analyze model behavior and turn observations from monitoring into hypotheses, experiments, and recommendations.
Translate research findings into practical monitoring and oversight approaches that can inform real training runs.
Collaborate with researchers and engineers across model training, alignment evaluations, monitoring, and frontier-risk work.
Produce externally publishable research when results advance the broader science of alignment.

You might thrive in this role if you:

Have strong hands-on experience training, evaluating, or debugging large ML models, especially LLMs.
Have deep curiosity, interest in alignment, and high agency.
Bring depth in alignment, interpretability, model behavior, empirical ML, or adjacent research.
Are excited to investigate chain-of-thought monitorability, monitoring methods, and scalable oversight.
Can turn ambiguous research questions into measurable experiments and follow the evidence when results are subtle or noisy.
Move comfortably between research ideation and engineering execution.
Are curious about multiple approaches to understanding model behavior and are not committed to only one methodological lens.
Operate with high independence while collaborating closely across research and engineering teams.
Care about making increasingly capable AI systems more monitorable, trustworthy, and safe.

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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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.

Compensation

$250K – $445K + Offers Equity

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Researcher, Alignment CoT Monitorability Alignment San Francisco