RE/RS, Data Understanding - Foundations

About the Role

About The Team The Data Understanding team is responsible for creating the high quality datasets and their quantized representation for OpenAI. This includes synthesizing data, building VQ representations, and processing, filtering, deduplication, quality control, and tokenization so it can be used effectively in big model training runs. About The Role We're looking to advance how OpenAI builds and understands pretraining data at scale. You'll treat data quality and curation as core research problems: developing new methods to select, combine, and transform data; creating datasets that improve model capabilities; and designing rigorous experiments to understand how data choices and interventions affect model learning and downstream behavior. You'll work closely with frontier models and web-scale data to build evidence for which approaches work and why, then translate successful research into scalable data processing pipelines We Expect You To - Have a strong track record of new or improved ML ideas, through publications, projects, or applied research. - Own and drive a research agenda, from choosing the right problems to carrying long-running work through to impact. - Be excited by OpenAI’s empirical, collaborative approach to research. Nice To Have - Thoughtfulness about AI’s impact, including privacy, provenance, and data quality. - Experience building high-performance deep learning or large-scale data processing systems. 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

Key Responsibilities

• Have a strong track record of new or improved ML ideas, through publications, projects, or applied research.
• Own and drive a research agenda, from choosing the right problems to carrying long-running work through to impact.
• Be excited by OpenAI’s empirical, collaborative approach to research.
• Thoughtfulness about AI’s impact, including privacy, provenance, and data quality.
• Experience building high-performance deep learning or large-scale data processing systems.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Strong problem solving foundations, knowledge of modern engineering practices, and interest in technology systems.

Perks & Benefits

• Official mentor support
• verified hiring timeline
• and career progression.