Researcher, Alignment CoT Monitorability

About the Team

The CoT Monitorability team at OpenAI studies whether and when the chain-of-thought of frontier reasoning models is monitorable enough to support scalable oversight. We study how to measure monitorability, which training mechanisms affect monitorability, and speculative methods to improve monitorability. While we mostly focus on CoT monitorability at the moment, we care more generally about any form of monitorability, auditing methods, and improving alignment.

We were the first to show that chain-of-thought monitoring can be a practical additional safety mechanism, and today our monitoring systems are actively used on OpenAI’s largest RL training runs to detect misbehavior. The issues we surface are then used to help improve our reward functions, environments, etc (without directly training against a CoT monitor).

Our work sits in Alignment and intersects with model training, alignment evaluations, monitoring, and frontier-risk research.We care most about monitorability where the stakes are high, and about preserving useful oversight signals as models become more capable.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have strong hands-on experience training, evaluating, or debugging large ML models, especially LLMs.
• Have deep curiosity, interest in alignment, and high agency.
• Bring depth in alignment, interpretability, model behavior, empirical ML, or adjacent research.
• Are excited to investigate chain-of-thought monitorability, monitoring methods, and scalable oversight.
• Can turn ambiguous research questions into measurable experiments and follow the evidence when results are subtle or noisy.
• Move comfortably between research ideation and engineering execution.
• Are curious about multiple approaches to understanding model behavior and are not committed to only one methodological lens.
• Operate with high independence while collaborating closely across research and engineering teams.
• Care about making increasingly capable AI systems more monitorable, trustworthy, and safe.

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.

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