Clinical Research Scientist Jobs in USA with Visa Sponsorship
Clinical Research Scientists work in specialty occupations that qualify for H-1B visa, O-1 visa, and EB-2 NIW sponsorship. Most roles require a master's or doctoral degree in a life sciences field. Employers including pharmaceutical companies, CROs, and academic medical centers regularly sponsor qualified candidates. For detailed occupation requirements, see the O*NET profile.
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Get Access To All JobsAbout The Team
Models are becoming increasingly capable—moving from tools that assist humans to agents that can plan, execute, and adapt in the real world. Mitigating the frontier risks resulting from these capabilities is paramount to OpenAI’s ability to continue deploying models safely. The Preparedness team is dedicated to addressing these critical risks. Our work includes:
- Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems.
- Mitigation. Keeping misalignment safeguards, alignment tools, and on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future.
- Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework, and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets.
This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society.
About The Role
Preparedness is hiring strong technical executors to support preparations for accelerated AI development, which may culminate in recursive self-improvement. This work relies on anticipating misalignment risks that might exist in the future, but might not exist now; so it’s especially important that people in this role are tasteful and strategic. The role is wide-ranging, covering any mitigation for loss of control risk, spanning the design and implementation of better pre-deployment risk-assessment, control measures, RSI-relevant training interventions, and turning one’s technical work into established institutional practices and external-facing communications.
Below Is a Subset Of Our Focus Areas
- Scalable oversight: Establishing practices for model misbehavior monitoring and oversight which remain effective in superhuman model capability regimes, with a focus on bridging from today’s monitoring approaches to future-proof ones.
- Automated auditing: As model capabilities increase, we’ll increasingly rely on automated approaches for finding the most severe forms of model misalignments. We’ll both need to sift through large swaths of production traffic to find the most egregious misalignments, and reliably elicit tail risks before deployment.
- Rigorous monitorability: Rigorous testing and red-teaming of our measurements of model misbehavior related to loss-of-control (e.g. reward hacking, sandbagging, scheming). This includes better understanding monitorability, and e.g. preparing for potential losses of Chain-of-Thought monitorability.
- Model behavior science: Design experiments and evaluations to understand the extent to which models are problematically misaligned, or their safety-relevant capabilities lag behind dangerous capabilities. This may include training model organisms of misbehavior for behaviors not currently present in production, or training interventions to increase safety-relevant capabilities.
- Coordination and verification: Prototype technical mechanisms for verifying compliance with potential future AI safety agreements.
- AI R&D risk measurement: Track progress toward automation of technical staff to inform OpenAI’s near-term investments in alignment and security.
- Maintaining and strengthening RSI safety cases: We’re especially interested in identifying and addressing blindspots of mitigation areas which we may have missed. Generally, our team alternates between performing rigorous hypothesis-driven research and turning our insights into interventions or control systems which impact production models, with occasional support of engineering teams.
In This Role, You Will
- Carefully consider the problems OpenAI might face in the future and how to prepare for them.
- Turn an open-ended objective like “prepare for future misalignment threats” into a much more concrete direction (e.g. “stress-test monitors for scheming”) – prioritizing the work that is most useful to start right now.
- Execute quickly, building scrappy prototypes, and then improving them iteratively until they become established components of our safety pipelines.
- Secure buy-in from other staff at OpenAI when necessary, and communicate your work clearly.
- Collaborate with or manage other staff as needed, since we might need to rapidly scale to tackle these problems quickly.
You Might Thrive In This Role If You
- Are an exceptional technical executor.
- Have strong strategic and research taste: you can prioritize effectively in domains with weak feedback loops.
- Are passionate about mitigating the risks associated with recursive self-improvement.
- Are driven by a desire to do whatever work most positively impacts the future of AI development.
- Bonus: you have already done work in one of the domains listed above (ML research, AI alignment, AI verification etc).
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates.
For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Compensation Range: $295K - $445K
About The Team
Models are becoming increasingly capable—moving from tools that assist humans to agents that can plan, execute, and adapt in the real world. Mitigating the frontier risks resulting from these capabilities is paramount to OpenAI’s ability to continue deploying models safely. The Preparedness team is dedicated to addressing these critical risks. Our work includes:
- Measurement. Monitoring and predicting the evolving capabilities of frontier AI systems.
- Mitigation. Keeping misalignment safeguards, alignment tools, and on track to adequately address extreme threats that might arise in the future.
- Coordination. Setting mitigation targets by maintaining OpenAI’s preparedness framework, and partnering with other staff to achieve these targets.
This is urgent, fast-paced work that has far-reaching implications for the company and for society.
About The Role
Preparedness is hiring strong technical executors to support preparations for accelerated AI development, which may culminate in recursive self-improvement. This work relies on anticipating misalignment risks that might exist in the future, but might not exist now; so it’s especially important that people in this role are tasteful and strategic. The role is wide-ranging, covering any mitigation for loss of control risk, spanning the design and implementation of better pre-deployment risk-assessment, control measures, RSI-relevant training interventions, and turning one’s technical work into established institutional practices and external-facing communications.
Below Is a Subset Of Our Focus Areas
- Scalable oversight: Establishing practices for model misbehavior monitoring and oversight which remain effective in superhuman model capability regimes, with a focus on bridging from today’s monitoring approaches to future-proof ones.
- Automated auditing: As model capabilities increase, we’ll increasingly rely on automated approaches for finding the most severe forms of model misalignments. We’ll both need to sift through large swaths of production traffic to find the most egregious misalignments, and reliably elicit tail risks before deployment.
- Rigorous monitorability: Rigorous testing and red-teaming of our measurements of model misbehavior related to loss-of-control (e.g. reward hacking, sandbagging, scheming). This includes better understanding monitorability, and e.g. preparing for potential losses of Chain-of-Thought monitorability.
- Model behavior science: Design experiments and evaluations to understand the extent to which models are problematically misaligned, or their safety-relevant capabilities lag behind dangerous capabilities. This may include training model organisms of misbehavior for behaviors not currently present in production, or training interventions to increase safety-relevant capabilities.
- Coordination and verification: Prototype technical mechanisms for verifying compliance with potential future AI safety agreements.
- AI R&D risk measurement: Track progress toward automation of technical staff to inform OpenAI’s near-term investments in alignment and security.
- Maintaining and strengthening RSI safety cases: We’re especially interested in identifying and addressing blindspots of mitigation areas which we may have missed. Generally, our team alternates between performing rigorous hypothesis-driven research and turning our insights into interventions or control systems which impact production models, with occasional support of engineering teams.
In This Role, You Will
- Carefully consider the problems OpenAI might face in the future and how to prepare for them.
- Turn an open-ended objective like “prepare for future misalignment threats” into a much more concrete direction (e.g. “stress-test monitors for scheming”) – prioritizing the work that is most useful to start right now.
- Execute quickly, building scrappy prototypes, and then improving them iteratively until they become established components of our safety pipelines.
- Secure buy-in from other staff at OpenAI when necessary, and communicate your work clearly.
- Collaborate with or manage other staff as needed, since we might need to rapidly scale to tackle these problems quickly.
You Might Thrive In This Role If You
- Are an exceptional technical executor.
- Have strong strategic and research taste: you can prioritize effectively in domains with weak feedback loops.
- Are passionate about mitigating the risks associated with recursive self-improvement.
- Are driven by a desire to do whatever work most positively impacts the future of AI development.
- Bonus: you have already done work in one of the domains listed above (ML research, AI alignment, AI verification etc).
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic. For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates.
For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy
At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
Compensation Range: $295K - $445K
See all 2,588+ Clinical Research Scientist Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Clinical Research Scientist roles.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Visa Sponsorship as a Clinical Research Scientist
Target CROs and pharma sponsors first
Contract research organizations and large pharmaceutical companies have established immigration infrastructure and sponsor Clinical Research Scientists routinely. These employers process H-1B petitions far more efficiently than smaller biotech startups or academic departments new to sponsorship.
Confirm your degree field matches the role
H-1B specialty occupation requires a direct nexus between your degree field and the job duties. A degree in clinical pharmacology, biostatistics, or epidemiology maps cleanly. A general biology degree may require additional documentation to satisfy USCIS specialty occupation standards.
Register for the H-1B lottery by March
USCIS opens H-1B registration in early March each year. Your employer must register you before the deadline. Missing it means waiting a full year. Confirm your employer's immigration counsel has you registered before the window closes.
Consider the O-1A if you have published research
Clinical Research Scientists with peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, or significant trial leadership may qualify for the O-1A extraordinary ability visa. This bypasses the lottery entirely and is worth discussing with an immigration attorney before assuming H-1B is your only path.
EB-2 NIW is viable if your research has national impact
If your clinical research addresses public health priorities or rare disease areas, you may self-petition for an EB-2 National Interest Waiver without employer sponsorship. This is particularly relevant for researchers working in oncology, infectious disease, or neglected conditions.
Get the LCA details in writing before accepting an offer
Ask your employer to confirm the prevailing wage level on the Labor Condition Application before you sign. The LCA wage level directly affects your H-1B petition and sets the floor for what you must be paid throughout the sponsorship period.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do Clinical Research Scientist roles qualify as H-1B specialty occupations?
Yes. Clinical Research Scientist positions consistently qualify as H-1B visa specialty occupations because the role normally requires at minimum a bachelor's degree in a specific scientific field such as clinical pharmacology, biochemistry, or biostatistics. USCIS has a strong approval history for this title across pharmaceutical and academic medical employers, though job duty documentation matters.
What degree do I need for a Clinical Research Scientist to sponsor my H-1B?
Most employers require a master's degree or Ph.D. in a life sciences field for Clinical Research Scientist roles, though some entry-level positions accept a bachelor's degree with substantial clinical trial experience. USCIS requires the degree field to directly relate to the job duties, so a degree in clinical research, pharmacology, epidemiology, or a closely related discipline is strongest.
Which employers most commonly sponsor Clinical Research Scientists?
The largest H-1B sponsors for this role are major pharmaceutical companies, large contract research organizations, and academic medical centers with active clinical trial programs. These employers have in-house immigration teams and sponsor researchers regularly. You can browse open Clinical Research Scientist roles from verified sponsoring employers on Migrate Mate.
Can I qualify for an EB-2 National Interest Waiver as a Clinical Research Scientist?
Potentially, yes. The NIW is well-suited for clinical researchers whose work addresses public health challenges with national significance, such as oncology trials, infectious disease research, or studies targeting rare conditions. You must show your work has substantial merit, national scope, and that waiving the job offer requirement serves U.S. interests. An immigration attorney can assess your publication and trial record.
What happens to my H-1B sponsorship if my clinical trial project ends mid-petition?
Your H-1B status is tied to the employer, not the specific project. As long as your employer-employee relationship continues and your duties remain consistent with the approved petition, project transitions do not require a new filing. If your role changes significantly, your employer should file an amended H-1B petition. A gap in employment, however, can put your status at risk.
What is the prevailing wage requirement for sponsored Clinical Research Scientist jobs?
U.S. employers sponsoring a visa must pay at least the prevailing wage, which is what workers in the same role, area, and experience level typically earn. The Department of Labor sets this rate to make sure companies aren't hiring foreign workers simply because they'd accept lower pay than a U.S. worker. It varies by job title, location, and experience. You can look up current prevailing wage rates for any occupation and location using the OFLC Wage Search page.