Machine Learning Engineer, Multimodal Perception and Authentication

📋 Job Overview

We’re looking for a machine learning engineer to help shape how future AI systems understand the physical world and the people in it. The role focuses on multimodal perception and authentication, bringing together signals from cameras, microphones, and other sensors. You’ll work with specialized perception models and larger multimodal models, and partner with hardware, firmware, software, and product teams to bring new research into real-world 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.

🎯 The Role

This role is based in San Francisco. We work in the office three days per week and offer relocation assistance.

✅ Key Responsibilities

• Research and develop multimodal perception and authentication methods across visual, audio, and other sensing signals.
• Explore how specialized perception models and larger multimodal models can work together.
• Design data, training, and evaluation approaches that improve performance in real-world conditions.
• Study model behavior, robustness, and failure modes across sensing, data, and deployment environments.
• Integrate and validate new capabilities in real-time or resource-constrained systems.
• Work with hardware, firmware, software, and product teams to turn research into working systems.

📌 Required Qualifications

• Have a strong background in computer vision, audio or speech machine learning, multimodal learning, or sensing.
• Have experience developing specialized machine learning models, larger multimodal models, or both.
• Have brought research ideas into practical systems, prototypes, or products.
• Know how to design experiments, build evaluations, and investigate model behavior.
• Have worked with sensing hardware, real-time systems, or other deployment constraints.
• Are proficient in Python and PyTorch and comfortable with C++ or systems integration.
• Have experience with authentication, biometrics, or other privacy-sensitive applications.
• Enjoy working across disciplines on research problems that are still taking shape.

🎁 Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

🛂 Visa & Eligibility

Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates.