Software Engineer, Research - Human Data

OpenAI
San Francisco, CA, USA2026-01-23

About the job

We’re looking for software engineers to join the Human Data team and build the platforms, prototypes, tools, and infrastructure that power how our AI models are trained, aligned, and evaluated. You’ll partner with researchers and cross-functional teams to bring alignment ideas to life, influence future model training, and shape how models interact with the real world.

Responsibilities

Build and maintain robust full-stack systems for feedback collection, data labeling, and evaluation pipelines, while maintaining high levels of security.

Translate experimental alignment research into scalable production infrastructure, including inference and model training stacks.

Design and iterate on user-facing tools and backend services to support high-quality data workflows

Partner with researchers, engineers, and program leads to shape feedback loops and model interaction paradigms

Drive infrastructure improvements that enable faster iteration and scaling across OpenAI’s frontier models, from internal research tooling all the way to production ChatGPT.

Qualifications

Minimum

Have strong software engineering fundamentals and experience building production systems at scale

Preferred

Enjoy full-stack development with end-to-end ownership — from backend pipelines to user interfaces

Are motivated by high-impact collaboration with research teams and solving novel, ambiguous problems

Are excited to shape how AI systems learn from human preferences and reflect a broad range of human values

Care deeply about inclusive tooling and building systems that enhance model safety, reliability, and usefulness