Research Scientist / Research Engineer - Foundations, Search

The role

You will develop foundational technology that enables models to retrieve and condition on information. This includes designing embedding training objectives, scalable vector store architectures, and dynamic indexing methods.

What you will do

• Tackle embedding models and retrieval systems optimized for grounding, relevance, and adaptive reasoning.
• Collaborate with researchers and engineers building end-to-end infrastructure for training, evaluating, and integrating embeddings into frontier models.
• Drive innovation in dense, sparse, and hybrid representation techniques, metric learning, and learning-to-retrieve systems.
• Collaborate closely with Pretraining, Inference, and other Research teams to integrate retrieval throughout the model lifecycle.
• Contribute to OpenAI’s long-term vision of AI systems with memory and knowledge access capabilities rooted in learned representations.

Required qualifications

• Proven experience leading high-performance teams of researchers or engineers in ML infrastructure or foundational research.
• Deep technical expertise in representation learning, embedding models, or vector retrieval systems.
• Familiarity with transformer-based LLMs and how embedding spaces can interact with language model objectives.
• Research experience in areas such as contrastive learning, supervised or unsupervised embedding learning, or metric learning.
• A track record of building or scaling large machine learning systems, particularly embedding pipelines in production or research contexts.
• A first-principles mindset for challenging assumptions about how retrieval and memory should work for large models.

Benefits

• Relocation assistance

Before you apply

• Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law.

About the company

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. They push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through their products.