Researcher, Automated Red Teaming at OpenAI

Location

San Francisco

Employment Type

Full time

Department

Safety Systems

Compensation

• Estimated Base Salary $295K – $445K

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits.

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts

• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)

• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match

• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)

• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees

• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)

• Mental health and wellness support

• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage

• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth

• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible

• Relocation support for eligible employees

• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

About the team

The Safety Systems org ensures that OpenAI’s most capable models can be responsibly developed and deployed. We build evaluations, safeguards, and safety frameworks that help our models behave as intended in real-world settings.

The Preparedness team is an important part of the Safety Systems org at OpenAI, and is guided by OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework.

Frontier AI models have the potential to benefit all of humanity, but also pose increasingly severe risks. To ensure that AI promotes positive change, the Preparedness team helps us prepare for the development of increasingly capable frontier AI models. This team is tasked with identifying, tracking, and preparing for catastrophic risks related to frontier AI models.

The mission of the Preparedness team is to:

1. Closely monitor and predict the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems, with an eye towards risks whose impact could be catastrophic
2. Ensure we have concrete procedures, infrastructure and partnerships to mitigate these risks and to safely handle the development of powerful AI systems

Preparedness tightly connects capability assessment, evaluations, and internal red teaming, and mitigations for frontier models, as well as overall coordination on AGI preparedness. This is fast paced, exciting work that has far reaching importance for the company and for society.

About the role

This role leads the Automated Red Teaming (ART) effort: building scalable, research-driven systems that continuously discover failure modes in our models and mitigations — and translate those findings into actionable, production-facing improvements. The goal is to maximize counterfactual reduction in expected harm by finding the highest-leverage, least-covered weaknesses early and reliably.

In this role you will

You will own the research and technical direction for automated red teaming across catastrophic risk areas, with an initial emphasis on:

• Automated classifier jailbreak discovery (cyber and bio)
• Automated bio threat-development elicitation (worst-feasible planning uplift)
• CoT monitoring evasion probing (and adjacent loss-of-control evaluations)

You will partner tightly with:

• Vertical risk teams (Cyber, Bio, Loss of Control) to define threat models, prioritize targets, and land mitigations
• The Classifiers team to turn discovered attacks into training data, evals, and measurable robustness gains
• Product / eng / safety stakeholders to ensure ART outputs are operationally useful (not just interesting)

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Feel a strong pull toward AI safety, and you’re motivated by reducing real-world catastrophic risk (not just publishing cool results)
• Love breaking systems (responsibly) — you get energy from finding weird, high-severity failure modes and turning them into concrete fixes
• Have strong applied research instincts, especially around evaluations: you’re good at designing experiments that are reproducible, interpretable, and hard to fool
• Bring hands-on experience with LLMs and agents, including multi-turn behaviors, tool use, and the ways models adapt to constraints
• Are comfortable building scalable automation, not just prototypes — you can turn red-teaming ideas into pipelines that run continuously and produce high-signal outputs
• Have solid software engineering fundamentals (data structures, algorithms, testing discipline) and you can work effectively in a production-adjacent environment
• Think in threat models and incentives, and you naturally ask “what would an attacker do next?” or “how would this fail under pressure?”
• Can translate messy findings into action, communicating clearly with researchers, engineers, product, and policy — and driving alignment on what to fix first
• Care about efficiency and prioritization, and you’re happy to say “no” to low-level