Researcher, Alignment CoT Monitorability
San Francisco • FullTime
Posted 1mo ago
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Research Engineer
About the job
OpenAI is seeking a Researcher focused on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Monitorability to join their Alignment team. This role involves studying and improving the monitorability of frontier reasoning models, particularly their chain-of-thought processes, to enable scalable oversight. The team's work is crucial for ensuring AI safety and trustworthiness as models become more capable. You will design and execute experiments to understand how various training interventions impact monitorability, develop evaluation methods to measure it, and translate research findings into practical recommendations for monitoring and training. This position is ideal for someone who can bridge ambiguous research questions with concrete experimental designs, moving from hypothesis formulation to analysis and actionable insights.
Responsibilities
- Design and run empirical studies on chain-of-thought monitorability in frontier reasoning models.
- Build evaluations to measure the reliability of monitors in predicting model properties, including misbehavior.
- Investigate how different training interventions affect monitorability.
- Analyze model behavior and translate observations into hypotheses, experiments, and recommendations.
- Translate research findings into practical monitoring and oversight approaches for training runs.
- Collaborate with researchers and engineers across model training, alignment evaluations, monitoring, and frontier-risk research.
- Produce externally publishable research advancing the science of alignment.
Requirements
- Strong empirical ML expertise.
- Deep interest in model behavior, alignment, or interpretability.
- Hands-on experience training, evaluating, or debugging large ML models, especially LLMs.
- High agency and curiosity.
- Depth in alignment, interpretability, model behavior, empirical ML, or adjacent research.
- Ability to turn ambiguous research questions into measurable experiments.
- Comfortable moving between research ideation and engineering execution.
- Ability to operate with high independence while collaborating closely across teams.
Benefits
- Hybrid work model (3 days in office per week)
- Relocation assistance