Research Manager

About the team

We are the home for multimodal and exploratory research at OpenAI. 

We build large-scale generative models with new multimodal capabilities, and believe that they are powerful tools for visualizing how our models perceive the world. Our past work in generative modeling includes DALL-E, Jukebox, and MuseNet.

We also train models which learn strong representations in domains outside of natural language, and believe that our most powerful models should be able to understand sensory inputs of many forms. Our past relevant work includes CLIP and ImageGPT.

Finally, we are a home for exploratory research at OpenAI. We’ve produced advancements in attention sparsity, normalizing flows, deep variational autoencoders, and diffusion, and GPT was once an exploratory project that originated on the Algorithms team.

We work at the cutting edge of multimodal research and you won’t encounter another organization with as much compute per employee. We move quickly, have access to huge resources, and our work directly impacts the success of OpenAI, and by extension, the field of AI as a whole.

In this role, you will:

• Oversee 2-3 of our projects in the multimodal space, work with the relevant tech leads on setting vision and scope, and ensure that we work efficiently to achieve our goals
• Ensure your team of researchers and engineers perform at their peak, are growing, and are advancing in their careers
• Create a diverse and inclusive culture that makes all feel welcome while enabling radical candor and challenging groupthink
• Work with leadership to ensure projects are on track, your team is utilized effectively, and project bottlenecks are effectively addressed
• Recruit top researchers, and mentor one resident per year

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have at least 5 years of research experience as an individual contributor and at least 2 years of experience as an research manager
• Enjoy working in a fast-paced research environment, and are motivated to out-execute external competitors
• Are deeply thoughtful about culture, DEI, and team structure, with a track record of improving these areas
• Have a deep understanding of relevant multimodal research
• Have experience hiring candidates against competing offers and the ability to craft and convey compelling visions of the future
• Have a voracious and intrinsic desire to learn and fill in missing skills, and an equally strong talent to share that information clearly and concisely with others
• Are comfortable with ambiguity and rapidly changing conditions. You view change as an opportunity to add structure and order when necessary.