Kenji Watanabe

Researcher — pre-training, scaling, evaluation

Member of Technical Staff, Pre-training at OpenAISan Francisco, CA · America/Los_Angeles14 yrs · IC6

ScreeningWarmSourcedPassiveUS citizen

AI match score

96/ 100

Strong

Last touched1w ago

OwnerMei Lin

Comp expectation$520,000–$720,000

Flight riskmedium

Current role

Member of Technical Staff, Pre-training · Mar 2024—Present (2 yr 1 mo)

OpenAI

AI/ML · growth · Team of 35

Drove ml research work end-to-end with partner teams.

Shipped a new pre-training recipe that beat the previous baseline
46% win-rate lift on internal eval suite
Redesigned the curriculum schedule and data mix; the team adopted the recipe for the next model generation.
Led evals track for a frontier model release
57+ new eval tasks landed before launch
Coordinated with red-teaming and product to close critical safety gaps on refusal and tool-use.
Reduced training-cluster idle time via a new scheduler
~74% GPU hours reclaimed per week
Designed and shipped a fair-share scheduler that avoided head-of-line blocking across 11 teams.

OP
Member of Technical Staff, Pre-trainingMar 2024—Present
OpenAI · San Francisco, CA · 2 yr 1 mo
HA
Senior Research ScientistNov 2021—Mar 2024
HashiCorp · San Francisco, CA · 2 yr 4 mo
MI
Research ScientistAug 2019—Nov 2021
Mistral · New York, NY · 2 yr 3 mo
SA
Research ScientistMay 2016—Aug 2019
Scale AI · San Francisco, CA · 3 yr 3 mo