Speculative Engineer/Research - Human Alignment, Consumer Devices

About the team

About the role

In this role you will

• Develop speculative but decision-useful prototypes for consumer devices and multimodal AI systems, including software behaviors, physical interactions, service layers, and evaluative artifacts.
• Create near-future concept demonstrators that help product, research, and leadership teams see promising device directions before conventional program plans narrow the space prematurely.
• Design reward structures, feedback loops, and long-horizon evaluation frameworks that test whether adaptive systems are actually beneficial, respectful, and trustworthy over time.
• Translate weak signals in model capability, human behavior, industrial design, and cultural practice into concrete prototypes that inform product direction, safety work, and research prioritization.
• Work across research, engineering, design, product, safety, and policy to define how personalized systems should learn, when they should act, and what boundaries should govern adaptation.
• Build datasets, rubrics, and qualitative-quantitative evaluation methods that capture context, appropriateness, long-term value, and lived human experience rather than only immediate satisfaction.
• Use artifact-led inquiry, speculative prototyping, and world-building methods to pressure-test possible futures for consumer devices before they harden into roadmaps.
• Help establish a small high-leverage studio practice that treats imaginative prototyping as a normal engineering method for exploring uncharted terrain.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have 10+ years of experience across some combination of engineering, research, design, HCI, creative technology, physical computing, or adjacent multidisciplinary practice.
• Are a genuine generalist with strong technical literacy and equally strong cultural, humanistic, or social-science-informed judgment; this role is not intended for narrow specialists.
• Have a demonstrated practice of building real artifacts under uncertainty, including prototypes, systems, products, or public works that changed how others thought or what organizations chose to do.
• Can work across software and hardware contexts and are comfortable moving from conceptual framing to implementation, testing, synthesis, and communication.
• Have designed or contributed to evaluation methods, experiments, or research frameworks that connect technical interventions to meaningful human outcomes.
• Have substantial experience outside standard corporate ladders, such as entrepreneurial work, independent labs, academic research, field-building, community-led initiatives, or self-directed practice that preserved your sensitivity to non-default futures.
• Write clearly, speak persuasively, and can align engineers, designers, executives, and researchers without flattening the complexity of the work.

Preferred qualifications

• Track record in speculative prototyping, design fiction, systems research, or related methods used not as theater but as disciplined tools for discovery, evaluation, and implementation.
• Experience creating both conceptual and material work: software systems, hardware prototypes, essays, talks, workshops, exhibitions, editorial projects, films, photographs, or other public artifacts.
• Founder/operator experience or comparable ownership scope in ambiguous environments where you had to invent the path, not just execute one.
• Background spanning more than one epistemic culture, for example engineering and humanities, research and entrepreneurship, or academic and independent practice.
• Experience with multimodal AI, personalization systems, memory, reinforcement learning from human feedback, preference modeling, or human-in-the-loop evaluation.
• History of leading communities, convening interdisciplinary collaborators, or shaping discourse in addition to shipping technical work.

Education & Experience

• Advanced degree (MS, MA, PhD) or equivalent experience in computer science, HCI, design, media arts, STS, anthropology, cognitive science, architecture, or related interdisciplinary domains is valued but not required.
• Equivalent nontraditional paths are welcome and encouraged, especially where there is strong evidence of technical competence, conceptual range, and sustained making practice.
• Portfolio required: applicants should be able to show work that demonstrates framing ability, technical execution, and the capacity to make unfamiliar futures concrete.

Additional requirements

• This role is based in San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 4 days in the office per week.
• Relocation assistance is available for new hires.
• OpenAI provides visa sponsorship and supports transfers where feasible.
• Must be able to work effectively across research, engineering, design, product, safety, and policy functions.
• Travel may be required for field research, partner engagements, off-sites, and prototype-based research activities.

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