Salary guide
| Country | Currency | Listings | Median pay | Middle half |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | USD | 19 | $440,000 | $365,000 to $440,000 |
The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models.
OpenAI · 23d ago
The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models.
OpenAI · 1y ago
The Foundations Research team works on high-risk, high-reward ideas that could shape the next decade of AI. Our goal is to advance the science and data that enable our training and scaling efforts, with a particular focus on future frontier models.
Zillow has the richest housing market data in the industry. You help us build out a foundational model that leverages a representation of who is in the market, what they’ll pay, and how that demand clears against supply.
OpenAI · 16d ago
The Human Flourishing team’s mission is to ensure AI systems understand and advance human flourishing. As AI becomes more capable and plays a larger role in people’s lives, we want its human benefits to grow with its capabilities.
The Health team, within OpenAI’s broader Post Training organization, has a mission to ensure AGI improves health for all humanity. Improving human health will be one of the defining impacts of AGI.
The Personalization-Memory team, within OpenAI's broader Post Training organization, is focused on developing agents that can learn from prior interactions in order to become more helpful and efficient over time.
OpenAI · 3mo ago
The Personalization-Memory team, within OpenAI's broader Post Training organization, is focused on developing agents that can learn from prior interactions in order to become more helpful and efficient over time.
The Post Training team is responsible for training and improving pre-trained models to be deployed into ChatGPT, the API, and potential future products.
The Post Training team seeks to empower all of humanity to benefit from frontier intelligence in whatever way they choose. We are responsible for training models to deploy to millions of users globally via ChatGPT, the API, and future products.
OpenAI · 11mo ago
The Post Training team is responsible for training and improving pre-trained models to be deployed into ChatGPT, the API, and potential future products.
Our team is organized around the north star goal of building an AI scientist – a system capable of solving the long term reasoning challenges and basic capabilities necessary to push the scientific and technological frontier.
Mercor · 1mo ago
As a Research Scientist at Mercor, you will work at the intersection of research and engineering on frontier post-training. You will develop new training and evaluation methods, test them through rigorous experiments, and implement successful approaches at scale.
We’re looking for a Research Scientist to lead the design of the next generation of APEX benchmarks and the expert-built datasets behind them.
The RL and Reasoning team drives the core reasoning paradigm and has created groundbreaking innovations such as o1 and o3. They focus on pushing the boundaries of reinforcement learning research, building next-generation generative models, and deploying them at scale.
As a Research Scientist here, you will develop innovative machine learning techniques and advance the research agenda of the team you work on, while also collaborating with peers across the organization.
Build and scale data generation pipelines using LLM-based methods combined with automated quality evaluation. resulting in datasets to improve both initial training and fine-tuning of LLMs such as Nemotron.
Drive research in agent post-training and reinforcement learning, shaping the technical direction of ambitious research programs grounded in observability and security.
Drive research in foundation models, world models, and multimodal learning, shaping the technical direction of ambitious research programs grounded in observability.
We do not publish a Research Scientist median yet: it needs at least 20 live USD listings and we currently have 19. This page covers only listings paying $400k+ or more.
The companies with the most open $400k+ Research Scientist listings are OpenAI (12 listings, median $440,000), Mercor (2 listings, median $363,000) and Datadog (2 listings, median $360,000).
The figures come from the salary ranges employers publish in their own job listings, collected from company career pages and applicant-tracking systems. Each listing counts once, at the midpoint of its range. Only USD listings go into the headline figures, and listings that are closed or stale are removed. The data was last refreshed on November 13, 2026.
Yes. Each listing is tagged remote, hybrid or on-site, and remote roles carry a region (US only, EMEA, APAC or global), so you can filter the live job list to the arrangement you want.
United States
