Senior Clinical Research Scientist Jobs in USA with Visa Sponsorship
Senior Clinical Research Scientists are among the more sponsorship-friendly roles in biotech and pharma, employers routinely file H-1B visa and O-1 visa petitions for qualified candidates. A master's or doctoral degree in a life sciences field is typically required, and most sponsors are large pharmaceutical companies, CROs, or academic medical centers. 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 2,592+ Senior Clinical Research Scientist Jobs
Sign up for free to unlock all listings, filter by visa type, and get alerts for new Senior Clinical Research Scientist roles.
Get Access To All JobsTips for Finding Visa Sponsorship as a Senior Clinical Research Scientist
Target large pharma and CROs first
Companies like Pfizer, Eli Lilly, ICON, and Syneos Health have established immigration programs and file H-1B petitions routinely. Smaller biotech startups may be willing but lack the infrastructure, leading to delays and errors in the petition process.
Align your degree field with your research area
USCIS scrutinizes specialty occupation claims closely for research roles. Your degree in pharmacology, biochemistry, or a related life science should directly correspond to your therapeutic area, a mismatch between field and function is a common RFE trigger.
Document your publications and clinical trial contributions
Peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and named contributions to IND submissions or regulatory filings strengthen both your H-1B petition and any future O-1A application. Compile this record before you start applying for sponsored positions.
Understand the H-1B lottery timeline before accepting offers
If you need cap-subject H-1B approval, registration opens in March for an October start. Cap-exempt employers, hospital systems, nonprofits, and universities, can file anytime. Knowing this prevents accepting an offer you cannot start on time.
Ask specifically about GCP experience in your application materials
Employers sponsoring Senior Clinical Research Scientists want evidence of Good Clinical Practice compliance, protocol development, and cross-functional trial management. Making these explicit in your resume signals you can contribute immediately and reduces employer hesitation about sponsorship costs.
Consider the O-1A if you have an exceptional research profile
Senior scientists with patents, significant citations, awards, or regulatory authorship credits may qualify for O-1A status, which has no lottery and no annual cap. This is worth exploring with an immigration attorney before relying solely on the H-1B registration process.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which visa types do employers most commonly sponsor for Senior Clinical Research Scientists?
The H-1B visa is the most common pathway. Senior Clinical Research Scientist roles qualify as specialty occupations because they require at minimum a bachelor's degree, and in practice almost always a master's or PhD, in pharmacology, biochemistry, biostatistics, or a closely related field. Employers with cap-exempt status, such as academic medical centers or nonprofit research institutes, can file H-1B petitions year-round. The O-1A is a strong alternative for candidates with a publication record, patents, or significant regulatory contributions.
Does a three-year bachelor's degree qualify for H-1B sponsorship in this role?
It can, but it requires careful documentation. USCIS accepts a three-year bachelor's degree combined with relevant postgraduate education or substantial work experience as equivalent to a U.S. four-year degree for specialty occupation purposes. For Senior Clinical Research Scientist positions, most petitions involve a master's or doctoral degree anyway, which removes the equivalency question entirely. If your highest credential is a three-year degree, work with your employer's immigration counsel to build a strong equivalency argument before filing.
How strong is H-1B approval for clinical research roles?
Approval rates for clinical research and life sciences positions are historically solid, but USCIS issues Requests for Evidence when the job description is broad or the degree field doesn't clearly map to the role. Senior-level titles help, they signal specialized knowledge rather than generalist functions. Petitions from large pharmaceutical companies and established CROs with dedicated immigration teams tend to have fewer RFEs than first-time sponsor employers. Specific documentation of protocol design responsibilities, regulatory filing involvement, and supervisory scope strengthens the specialty occupation argument.
What should I look for in a sponsoring employer beyond the visa offer itself?
Look for employers who use experienced immigration counsel, have filed H-1B petitions before, and are willing to cover petition fees rather than passing costs to you. Ask during the offer stage whether they sponsor for green card as well, many Senior Clinical Research Scientists pursue EB-2 or EB-3 sponsorship after establishing themselves. You can browse companies currently posting sponsored roles for this title on Migrate Mate, which filters specifically for visa-sponsoring employers.
Can I switch employers mid-H-1B as a Senior Clinical Research Scientist?
Yes. H-1B portability allows you to start working for a new employer as soon as they file an H-1B transfer petition, without waiting for approval, provided your current H-1B was previously approved and you haven't violated status. The new employer files a new I-129 petition covering your specific role and responsibilities. Keep copies of your existing approval notices and pay stubs, as the new employer's counsel will need them to establish portability eligibility.
What is the prevailing wage requirement for sponsored Senior 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.