Artificial intelligence
10 OpenAI research engineers
These ten current OpenAI research engineers hold Research Engineer or Member of Technical Staff roles at the company, and their titles or profiles describe research engineering work there. A reader can learn what research engineering work at OpenAI involves from people who have done it.
Professionals to explore
01—10Alexandre Karpenko
LinkedInExperience: Research Engineer · OpenAI
Research Engineer at OpenAI since November 2022, listed in the Research department. He was a Senior Staff Engineer at VSCO® (2019–2021), Co-founder & CEO of Rylo Inc. (2015–2019), a Software Engineer at Instagram (2013–2015) and Co-founder of midnox (2011–2013).
Ayush Soni
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · OpenAI
Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI since December 2025, with the headline Research Engineer, OpenAI and a role description that reads MTS, Research; the profile says he builds 0->1 work at OpenAI and was previously on Sora. He was a Machine Learning Engineer at Google from 2019 to 2025, where the profile says he worked in Research on NLP.
Hunter L.
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · OpenAI
Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI since October 2022, with the headline Research Engineer at OpenAI; he also held a Member of Technical Staff, Resident role at OpenAI in 2022. At Nuro he was Senior Software Engineer (2021–2022), Tech Lead (2021–2022) and Software Engineer (2019–2021).
Jiayi Weng
LinkedInExperience: Research Engineer · OpenAI
Research Engineer at OpenAI since July 2022; the role description reads ChatGPT, RLHF Infra, and the role is listed in the Research department. The profile also lists Research Engineer at Sea (2021), Research Assistant at Tsinghua University (2018–2020) and research internships at Mila and SenseTime.
Michael Rampell
LinkedInExperience: Research Engineer · OpenAI
Research Engineer at OpenAI since July 2021, listed in the Research department, with the headline Research Engineer @ OpenAI | Computer Science @ UW. He held a research internship at Google Brain (2020), an Applied Scientist Intern role at Amazon Web Services (2019) and research internships at MIT CSAIL and MIT (2018).
Morgan Griffiths
LinkedInExperience: Research Engineer · OpenAI
Research Engineer at OpenAI since October 2023, listed in the Research department, after an AI Scientist Residency at OpenAI in 2023. Before OpenAI the profile lists Full Stack Engineer at Level Learning (2022–2023) and Co-Founder of Routemuse (2019–2022).
Omkar Salpekar
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · OpenAI
Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI since January 2026, with a headline describing research and pretraining LLMs at OpenAI. At Meta he was a Staff Research Engineer (2024–2026), where his profile says he worked on pretraining for Llama 3 and Llama 4, a Senior Software Engineer (2023–2024) and a Software Engineer (2019–2023).
Rohan Shah
LinkedInExperience: Research Engineer · OpenAI
Research Engineer at OpenAI since January 2026, listed in the Research department. He was a Senior Machine Learning Engineer (2025–2026) and Machine Learning Engineer (2024–2025) at Eightfold AI, and a Graduate Research Assistant at Carnegie Mellon University (2022–2023) and UCLA (2023).
Sen Wang
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · OpenAI
Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI since January 2026, with the headline Research Engineer@OpenAI. The profile lists Staff Machine Learning Engineer roles at Coupang (2022 and 2024–2025), Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Coupang (2021) and Software Engineer at OpenSea (2022–2024).
Shuyuan Zhang
LinkedInExperience: Member of Technical Staff · OpenAI
Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI since October 2023, with the headline Research Engineer at OpenAI; the profile says the work at OpenAI has involved using RL to push the reasoning and coding capability of LLMs. Earlier roles include Staff Software Engineer at Google DeepMind (2023) and Staff Software Engineer, Google Brain at Google (2017–2023).
Choose the right perspective
Match the person's focus to your question, since RLHF infrastructure, pretraining, reinforcement learning for reasoning and new research projects each involve different engineering work. Check when each person joined and where they came from, because someone who joined in 2021 or 2022 and someone who joined in 2026 can speak to different stages of the company.
Questions to take into the conversation
- 01How is work split between research engineers and research scientists on a large project?
- 02What engineering habits matter most when experiments run on very large compute budgets?
- 03What background helped you most when moving into research engineering at an AI lab?
Reaching OpenAI research engineers
How can I contact one of these OpenAI research engineers?
Pick one of the 10 people on this page and choose "Book a paid call", or describe your project to find others. You offer a fee for a 15-minute call or a written answer, Instant Expert finds the person's work email and sends the invitation, and they decide whether to accept. The list covers 1 company: OpenAI, based on profile data retrieved on October 8, 2026. Being listed here doesn't mean someone has agreed to take calls.
How much does it cost to reach OpenAI research engineers?
You choose the offer, starting at $5 per person. It includes Instant Expert's 20% fee, so an offer that pays the person $100 costs you $125. You're charged only when the person books the call or sends the answer.
What if they don't reply?
You pay nothing. Instant Expert sends follow-up reminders, and if the person hasn't booked or answered within 7 days, the request expires and any hold on your card is released. You can invite several of the 10 people on this list at once and cap your total spend, so you pay only for the ones who accept.
Can an AI agent ask one of these OpenAI research engineers a question?
Yes. An agent with a USDC wallet on Base can ask one question without an Instant Expert account. It names the person, for example by the LinkedIn URL on this page, and pays per ask over x402 (HTTP 402). The person answers in writing or by voice note, and if nobody answers within 7 days, the payment goes back to the wallet automatically. x402 docs
About this directory
This is a professional research starting point based on business profile data retrieved on . Titles and companies reflect that source snapshot and may describe past or present roles. Check the linked profiles for current details. Inclusion does not imply Instant Expert membership or availability.
Request a correction or removal