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Software Engineer, Preparedness

OpenAI

  • $200K – $385K
  • Full time
  • San Francisco, CA
  • On-site
  • Job Description

    About the team

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

    Specifically, the mission of the Preparedness team is to:

    1. Closely monitor and predict the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems, with an eye towards misuse risks whose impact could be catastrophic (not necessarily existential) to our society; and

    2. Ensure we have concrete procedures, infrastructure and partnerships to mitigate these risks and, more broadly, to safely handle the development of powerful AI systems.

    Our team will tightly connect capability assessment, evaluations, and internal red teaming for frontier models, as well as overall coordination on AGI preparedness. The team’s core goal is to ensure that we have the infrastructure needed for the safety of highly-capable AI systems—from the models we develop in the near future to those with AGI-level capabilities. 

    About you

    We are looking to hire exceptional software engineers that can help push the boundaries of our frontier models and build the infrastructure to enable our team. 

    In this role, you will:

    • Help build (and then continuously refine) evaluations of frontier AI models that assess the extent of identified risks, using the latest research on capability elicitation

    • Design and build infrastructure, systems and processes that can support these kinds of evaluations, and scalably track their results

    • Work closely with other teams to incorporate monitoring of real-world misuse risks into our evaluation processes

    • Create lightweight full-stack applications to help demonstrate our results to external audiences

    We expect you to be:

    • Able to operate effectively in a dynamic and extremely fast-paced research environment

    • Able to scope and deliver projects end-to-end

    • A builder who can get things done

    It would be great if you also have:

    • A good understanding of the (nuances of) societal aspects of AI deployment

    • An ability to work cross-functionally

    • A humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.

    • Excellent communication skills

    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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. 

    For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

    We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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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 Range: $200K - $385K