Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Human Flourishing
- Location
- San Francisco, CA
- Listed
- 12 days ago
About the Role
We’re looking for an exceptional, hands-on researcher to turn difficult-to-define signals of long-term flourishing into measurable improvements in model behavior. You’ll help set research direction, build what is needed to test your ideas, and drive successful work into the models and products we ship.
We’re especially interested in researchers with deep experience improving frontier models through pretraining or reinforcement learning (RL) / post-training, especially on less verifiable problems, or researchers who combine strong LLM skills with deep expertise in domains like education or mental health. Prior experience in these domains is not required.
In this role, you will
- Develop scalable training methods across the training stack that improve how models understand people’s values, support their agency, and help them achieve long-term goals.
- Lead high-leverage research from an open question to a shipped improvement: choose a hard-to-define problem, iteratively define success, run experiments, and integrate into frontier models.
- Build RL environments for difficult-to-verify outcomes, and study whether beneficial behavior generalizes across settings.
- Create evaluations grounded in human expertise and feedback that reveal capability gaps, unintended incentives in RL, and failures that aggregate scores can miss.
- Test whether measures of model behavior predict better learning, wellbeing, and other long-term outcomes, and use those findings to guide training.
- Build new 0>1 capabilities in human domains that may have an increasing impact with upcoming increases in model intelligence and test-time compute.
- Partner with product teams, engineers, partnerships teams, and domain experts to deploy promising methods, measure their effects in real use, and turn what you learn into further improvements.
- Assess AI’s impacts on human flourishing at the scale of over a billion users.
You might thrive in this role if you
- Care deeply about helping AI improve people’s lives, and feel this is a responsibility that comes with increasingly capable models.
- Have an unusually strong research record in pretraining or RL / post-training research, especially in a hard-to-verify area; or combine strong LLM research skills with deep expertise in education, mental health, or a related field of human benefit.
- Are a hands-on builder who can turn ideas into rigorous experiments, write and debug code, and work directly with data and training infrastructure.
- Have the taste to choose consequential problems and actionable steps on the path to solving those problems.
- Take ownership of ambiguous problems and choose methods based on the impact they can deliver, including when the most useful work is unglamorous.
- Care about whether a capability will scale, generalize, and make it into the real world-not just whether it can be shown in a paper or prototype.
- Work well across disciplines and can grok the most important bottlenecks to scaling our impact in a multidisciplinary problem.
If you’re excited about ensuring AI systems advance human flourishing, we’d love to hear from you.
About the Team
The Human Flourishing team’s mission is to ensure AI systems understand and advance human flourishing. As AI becomes more capable and plays a larger role in people’s lives, we want its human benefits to grow with its capabilities. The Human Flourishing team is part of the broader Personal AGI organization.
Our approach has two parts. Firstly, we measure and improve models’ understanding, capability, and propensity to act according to people’s values and to help them achieve their long-term goals. Secondly, we directly scale tangible impact for users in human domains like education and mental health, working across research, product, and partnerships to increase the benefits over a billion people experience weekly when they use ChatGPT.
Our recent work includes Beneficial RL which investigates how training for beneficial behavior generalizes across settings, and MentalHealthBench a benchmark developed with mental health experts to evaluate realistic conversations.
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.
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.
Equal opportunity and legal notices
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.
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.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link
From OpenAI's careers page, first listed on Rolev.ai on October 28, 2026. Rolev.ai is not the employer.
How Rolev.ai helps with this application
Rolev.ai is a job search and application tool for US job seekers. For this Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Human Flourishing role at OpenAI, it shows how your resume fits, tailors your resume to the posting, and prepares the application for you to review.
See how you fit
Openings from employer career sites are ranked against your whole resume—and searchable inside Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor via Rolev.ai MCP.
Tailor without inventing
Every change to your resume is checked against your original. New experience goes in only with your yes—zero fabricated claims.
Draft the full kit
Tailored and Full Match resumes, role-specific cover letters, and answers to employer screening questions are prepared in seconds.
1-Click Extension Autofill
The Chrome extension fills the employer's Greenhouse, Workday, Lever, or Ashby form in 1 click. You review it and press Submit.
Similar roles
- Research Engineertalentpluto · San Francisco, CA
- Research Engineer - WildfireInsurance Institute for Business & Home Safety · Richburg, SC
- Research Engineering Manager, STEMTuring · United States
- Research Engineer - Robotics AIBosch Group · Sunnyvale, CA · Experienced/ Middle Tariff
- Research EngineerPercepta · New York City, NY
- Research Engineer IIZebra · Morris Plains, NJ
Common questions
Where is the Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Human Flourishing job at OpenAI located?
This Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Human Flourishing position at OpenAI is located in San Francisco, CA. Always check OpenAI's application page for specific state eligibility or relocation policies.
How do I apply for the Research Engineer / Research Scientist, Human Flourishing position at OpenAI?
This listing links directly to OpenAI's Ashby application page. You can apply directly on OpenAI's site, or use Rolev.ai to check your resume fit, generate a zero-hallucination tailored resume and cover letter for this posting, and autofill the Ashby application form in 1 click with the Rolev.ai Chrome extension. You always review the form and press Submit yourself.