Research Engineer / Research Scientist - RE / RS - Personal AGI, Proactivity
Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs Work on personalization and proactivity sits at the center of where modern SaaS is heading, especially for AI-native products delivered through a subscription interface. This role is notable because it targets capabilities that directly shape day-to-day user value in tools like ChatGPT: anticipating intent, adapting to changing preferences, and making agentic behavior reliably helpful. It reflects a SaaS environment where model quality and product usefulness are tightly coupled, and where research outcomes must translate into user-facing improvements. For a long-term SaaS career, the role offers durable leverage in areas that travel across AI-enabled software companies: post-training methods, evaluation design, and the practical mechanics of turning research into measurable product gains. Building datasets and robust evals is also a repeatable advantage in SaaS, where iteration speed and trustworthy metrics often determine which features ship and how they evolve over time. Cross-functional partnering with product and adjacent research teams further reinforces the product-driven research loop common in leading SaaS organizations. This position fits professionals who enjoy owning a research agenda while staying close to implementation details in a large codebase. It suits candidates who prefer rigorous measurement alongside experimentation, and who are motivated by applied ML work that must hold up under real user behavior rather than benchmark-only progress. The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the Team The Proactivity Research team, within OpenAI’s broader Personal AGI team, is focused on making our models in ChatGPT and future potential products proactive in ways that are truly useful. We're laying the technical foundations for AI that can anticipate what users need in real time, adapt as their goals and preferences shift, and build a deeper, evolving understanding of the person it's helping.
About the Role
As a Research Engineer / Scientist, you will research and develop improvements to our models’ personalization and agentic capabilities. Our team works on reinforcement learning, dataset creation, evaluations, and other post-training methods. We partner closely with research and product teams across the company to realize the vision of a highly personalized, collaborative, and proactive assistant. We're looking for individuals with strong ML engineering skills and research experience, especially with novel and highly capable models. An ideal candidate is passionate about product-driven research. 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:
- Own and pursue a research agenda to improve the proactivity and ability of our models to further user goals.
- Build robust evaluations for tracking modeling improvements.
- Design, implement, test, and debug code across our research stack.
- Collaborate closely with the other research and product teams to influence the shape of technical solutions in the product
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have a deep understanding of machine learning and machine learning applications.
- Have a working knowledge of LLM post-training and evaluation approaches
- Are passionate about, or have experience thinking about, personalization and enabling users to achieve their goals
- Are comfortable diving into a large ML codebase to debug.
- Thrive in a dynamic and technically complex environment.
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. To 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. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link. OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy 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.