Machine Learning Engineer, Core Experimentation
OpenAI
Summary
We are looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to lead the technical direction for ML-powered experimentation and insights capabilities. You will build production systems that learn from privacy-protected product and experimentation data to generate evidence-backed insights and support decision-making, and help teams decide which ideas are worth testing live. This is an end-to-end, 0-to-1 role.
Job description
About the Role
We are looking for a Machine Learning Engineer to lead the technical direction for ML-powered experimentation and insights capabilities. You will build production systems that learn from privacy-protected product and experimentation data to generate evidence-backed insights and support decision-making, and help teams decide which ideas are worth testing live. This is an end-to-end, 0-to-1 role.
You will work across ML modeling, retrieval and LLM systems, statistical methods, simulation, data and training pipelines, backend services, and user- and agent-facing product experiences. The hard part is not merely producing a plausible answer. It is making each insight and prediction traceable, calibrated, useful, and safe enough to influence real product decisions.
In This Role, You Will
- Set and execute the technical roadmap for Generative Insights and Predictive Experimentation, from early prototypes through production adoption.
- Build cross-experiment learning systems that retrieve and synthesize historical experiments, detect recurring effects and segment behavior, reanalyze prior results when data or methods improve, and generate hypotheses with clear evidence and provenance.
- Develop predictive models and simulation workflows, including simulation-based evaluation approaches, to estimate likely impact, affected segments, regression risk, and uncertainty before a full live experiment.
- Create high-quality datasets and feature or retrieval pipelines from exposures, events, metrics, experiment metadata, and replay data, with strong lineage, freshness, privacy, and data-quality controls.
- Establish rigorous evaluation through offline benchmarks, backtests, calibration, drift monitoring, prediction-to-outcome comparisons, and explicit failure or abstention behavior.
- Turn models into durable product, API, and agent workflows that move from an insight to experiment design, approval-gated action, and measured learning.
- Partner deeply with data science and product teams on experiment design, causal inference, sequential decision-making, variance reduction, and the boundary between prediction and causal evidence.
- Build reliable services and intuitive workflows so sophisticated ML capabilities are understandable and useful to teams making high-stakes product decisions.
- Provide technical leadership across engineering, product, data science, and research partners, and raise the bar for production ML quality across the platform.
You Might Thrive In This Role If You
- Have led ambiguous 0-to-1 production ML products where success was measured by better real-world decisions, not only offline model metrics.
- Have strong hands-on experience across the ML lifecycle: dataset design, training or adaptation, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
- Bring depth in one or more of LLM and retrieval systems, ranking or recommendation, forecasting or anomaly detection, causal ML or experiment analysis, or simulation. You do not need to have done all of them.
- Have strong software engineering fundamentals and can build high-quality production systems in Python while working comfortably across data, backend, and platform boundaries.
- Have a strong grounding in machine learning, statistics, computer science, or a related field through formal study or equivalent practical experience.
- Understand experimentation and statistical reasoning, especially why predictive accuracy is not the same as causal validity.
- Treat calibration, uncertainty, provenance, privacy, and human review as product requirements, not cleanup work.
- Can translate ambiguous partner questions into a product and technical roadmap, and work well with product, data science, research, and infrastructure partners.
- Enjoy building for internal power users and agents, and can make sophisticated ML capabilities feel clear and actionable.
- Value in-person collaboration and want to help shape a growing Bellevue-based team.
Location and Workplace
This role is based in Bellevue, Washington. The team works in person and uses that time to move quickly, solve ambiguous problems together, and stay close to the product teams we support.
Requirements
- Led ambiguous 0-to-1 production ML products
- Strong hands-on experience across the ML lifecycle: dataset design, training or adaptation, evaluation, deployment, monitoring, and iteration
- Depth in one or more of LLM and retrieval systems, ranking or recommendation, forecasting or anomaly detection, causal ML or experiment analysis, or simulation
- Strong software engineering fundamentals
- Build high-quality production systems in Python
- Strong grounding in machine learning, statistics, computer science, or a related field
- Understand experimentation and statistical reasoning
- Treat calibration, uncertainty, provenance, privacy, and human review as product requirements
- Translate ambiguous partner questions into a product and technical roadmap
- Work well with product, data science, research, and infrastructure partners
Benefits
- Medical insurance
- Dental insurance
- Vision insurance
- Health savings accounts
- Health FSA
- Dependent care FSA
- Commuter expenses
- 401(k) retirement plan
- Paid parental leave
- Paid medical leave
- Paid caregiver leave
- Flexible PTO
- Paid company holidays
- Paid sick time
- Mental health support
- Life and disability coverage
- Learning and development stipend
- Daily meals
- Relocation support
- Charitable donation matching
Company overview
OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory and company based in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman, OpenAI initially operated as a non-profit research organization before transitioning to a capped-profit model. The company's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. OpenAI has developed groundbreaking AI technologies including GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) models, DALL-E for image generation, and Codex for programming assistance. Their most notable product, ChatGPT, has revolutionized human-AI interaction and brought large language models to mainstream audiences. OpenAI conducts cutting-edge research in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and reinforcement learning, while also developing practical AI applications that are transforming industries worldwide.