Want to get a job at OpenAI? These are key skills to have, one company leader says

• Jan Leike, the head of superalignment at OpenAI, is hiring, he told "The 80,000 Hours Podcast."
• He is looking for research engineers, scientists, and managers. The roles can earn between $245,000 to $500,000 a year.
• Candidates don't need a PhD — though they must be good at coding and thinking critically.

Interested in working for OpenAI, the buzzy company behind ChatGPT? A leader from the company shared what skills he's looking for when hiring.

Jan Leike, OpenAI's head of superalignment — a new team that aims to make the company's AI systems align with human interests — said on a recent podcast episode that his team is hiring for a range of research-related positions.

"We are primarily hiring for research engineers, research scientists, and research managers, and I expect we'll be continuing to hire a lot of people," Leike said on an episode of "The 80,000 Hours Podcast," the titular podcast from the work-focused Y Combinator-backed nonprofit. "It'll probably be at least 10 before the end of the year, is my guess. And then maybe even more in the years after that."

Strong candidates know how to code, understand machine learning, and think critically, Leike said. They must also have a passion for making AI safer, he added.

Research engineers on OpenAI's superalignment team are responsible for designing and implementing experiments for safety research, and can make between $245,000 and $450,000 a year, according to OpenAI's job listing. The job entails writing code for machine learning training, managing experimental datasets, and fixing bugs.

Leike said the job doesn't require experience in AI safety or a PhD in machine learning, which he added is the "traditional way" to break into the field. Instead, Leike said his team is primarily looking for a candidate who knows how to develop machine learning models.

Working closely with research engineers, research scientists are responsible for advancing OpenAI's alignment research agenda. A research scientist — who can also make up to $450,000 a year — is tasked with brainstorming how to address problems and guiding how the research is designed.

Research engineers and scientists, Leike said, both require "a lot of critical thinking, and asking important questions, and being very curious about the world and the technology that we're building."

The research manager position oversees the research engineers and research scientists. A research manager, who would earn between $420,000 to $500,000 a year, is responsible for guiding the direction of the team.

An ideal candidate for the leadership role, Leike said, would have a combination of management experience and machine learning skills. Ideal candidates, he said, range from someone who has led a research team at a machine learning company to a manager in a different field who has contributed to large language model projects to a postdoc who has led a small research team.

A manager should "really care about the problems that we're trying to solve," and needs to be "really good" at coding and machine learning, Leike added.

Leike sees his team addressing "one of the most important problems," given the risks the technology may pose to humanity. A job candidate that agrees with the sentiment, he said, would be a good fit for OpenAI.

"If you want to work in a team of highly motivated, talented people who are really trying to solve ambitious problems and have a lot of resources to do so, this is the place to go," Leike said.

OpenAI isn't just hiring for its superalignment team. The company, which has 1,715 employees, per its LinkedIn, has 59 job openings as of August 8, including for an account executive, a customer success manager for its "Go To Market" team, and team leads for its public policy department.

OpenAI didn't respond to Insider's immediate request for comment before publication.