Researcher, Pretraining Safety
As a Researcher in Pretraining Safety, you will develop pioneering safety measures for AI models before deployment. This involves identifying and evaluating unsafe behaviors in early-stage models, designing safe-by-design architectures, and strengthening models with early safety signals through hands-on research and collaboration across safety teams.
The Safety Systems team is responsible for various safety work to ensure our best models can be safely deployed to the real world to benefit society and is at the forefront of OpenAI's mission to build and deploy safe AGI, driving our commitment to AI safety and fostering a culture of trust and transparency.
The Pretraining Safety team’s goal is to build safer, more capable base models and enable earlier, more reliable safety evaluation during training. We aim to:
In addition, we will conduct the foundational research necessary for understanding how behaviors emerge, generalize, and can be reliably measured throughout training.
The Pretraining Safety team is pioneering how safety is built into models before they reach post-training and deployment. In this role, you will work throughout the full stack of model development with a focus on pre-training:
We collaborate across OpenAI’s safety ecosystem—from Safety Systems to Training—to ensure that safety foundations are robust, scalable, and grounded in real-world risks.
Posted June 7, 2026