Machine Learning Engineer, Growth

OpenAI’s Growth team is seeking a machine learning engineer to develop models and decision systems that improve how paid marketing investment is allocated across ChatGPT and other OpenAI products.

Location and Work Model

San Francisco, CA (hybrid). The hybrid model includes three days in the office per week, and relocation support is available for eligible employees.

Compensation

USD 381,000 - 423,000 per year, plus offers equity. Base pay may vary based on individualized factors. Additional compensation may include performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, along with the listed benefits. This role is at-will, and OpenAI may modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

Role Summary

The role focuses on optimizing paid marketing investment through budget allocation, spend pacing and control, response and value modeling, rigorous evaluation, and ownership of reliable production systems.

Responsibilities

• Build budget allocation algorithms.
• Determine how to distribute investment across channels, campaigns, and markets using estimates of marginal returns, while accounting for diminishing returns, uncertainty, and business constraints.
• Develop spend pacing and adaptive control systems.
• Adjust budgets and spending rates as performance changes, balancing responsiveness with stability when feedback is delayed or noisy.
• Build spend limits, monitoring, and safe fallback behavior.
• Model marketing response and user value.
• Develop forecasts and models of conversion, long-term value, and saturation to identify where incremental budget can have the greatest impact.
• Evaluate decisions rigorously.
• Use simulations, backtesting, and online experiments to test allocation and control policies.
• Partner with Data Science to measure incrementality and validate whether offline improvements translate into better investment outcomes.
• Own reliable production systems.
• Build data pipelines, training and inference workflows, and integrations that convert model outputs into budget decisions.
• Establish data-quality checks, monitoring, and retraining approaches with thoughtful treatment of privacy and consent.
• Turn business goals into optimization problems.
• Partner with Growth Marketing, Data Science, Engineering, and Finance to define objectives and constraints, communicate tradeoffs, and use evidence to improve investment decisions.
• Help build a diverse and inclusive culture where people feel welcome, challenge assumptions, and collaborate with candor and respect.

Required Experience

• 5+ years of experience as a Machine Learning Engineer, Applied Scientist, Data Scientist, or in a comparable quantitative engineering role, or an equivalent record of impact.
• Experience building and operating production ML or quantitative decision systems and data pipelines through deployment, experimentation, and monitoring.

Qualifications

• Strong software engineering skills, including proficiency in Python and SQL, plus hands-on experience with ML frameworks and large-scale data systems.
• Strong foundations in machine learning and statistics, with experience applying optimization or control methods to decisions under uncertainty.
• Experience evaluating models or algorithms using noisy, delayed, or incomplete data, with the judgment to balance causal impact, model quality, and operational reliability.
• Ability to translate ambiguous goals into focused experiments, interpret mixed results, and communicate clear decisions to technical and non-technical partners.
• Collaborative working style and commitment to deploying AI responsibly in service of OpenAI’s mission.

Technologies

Python, SQL

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.
• Daily meals in 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 be provided.

About the Team

• The Growth team drives user and revenue growth across ChatGPT’s consumer and business segments and other OpenAI products worldwide.
• Work spans the full funnel, from awareness and acquisition through activation, retention, and expansion, using experimentation, data science, machine learning, and product engineering.
• Partners include Product, Engineering, Data Science, Design, Finance, Lifecycle, and Growth Marketing.
• The team moves quickly, tests rigorously, and emphasizes measurement, privacy, reliability, and user trust.