Research Scientist, Mid-training

About the Team

The Mid-training team does cross-cutting research, engineering, and execution, including activities classically associated with both pre-training and post-training. We improve OpenAI’s flagship models, adding new capabilities and making them more efficient. Recent examples of artifacts with major contributions from our team include GPT4-Turbo and GPT-4o.

About the Role

The efficiency of our frontier model architectures is key to making today’s models and those of the future accessible. Step-change improvements to efficiency can unlock new interfaces, enable new applications, and impact the frontier itself.

Ideal candidates have a deep understanding of state-of-the art architectures, a sophisticated understanding of LLM inference, and a hands-on empirical approach. A strong grasp of hardware (e.g. GPU memory hierarchy) is a plus. Competency with profiling, low-level optimization, and kernel writing is also desired. A good fit for this role will be equally happy coming up with a creative breakthrough, investing in strengthening a baseline, designing an eval, debugging a thorny regression, or tracking down a bottleneck.

This role is based in London, UK. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Design, execute, and analyze experiments autonomously and collaboratively
• Study, debug, and optimize both model performance and computational performance
• Contribute to training and inference infrastructure

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have experience landing contributions to major LLM training runs
• Can thoroughly evaluate and improve deep learning architectures in a self-directed fashion
• Are motivated by safely deploying LLMs in the real world
• Are well-versed in the state of the art transformer modifications for efficiency

Compensation, Benefits and Perks

This is a position with OpenAI UK Ltd., which controls the hiring and management of this position. Total compensation includes competitive salary, generous equity and benefits.

• Private medical insurance covering 100% of premiums for employees and their dependents
• Pension plan with 4% employer contribution
• 52 weeks maternity leave and 20 weeks parental leave
• Unlimited time off
• Annual learning & development stipend (£1,200 per year)

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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