Product Design Manager

About the Team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Application Technology team works across research, engineering, product, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to the world. We serve a diverse audience of users who are already using ChatGPT, Codex, API, etc, daily in their lives and work.

We seek to learn from deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this powerful tool is used responsibly and safely. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.

About the Role

Design plays a critical role here. To succeed in our mission, it’s crucial that we make our technology intuitive and accessible. We’re hiring a design manager to lead products that are easy to use, beautiful, and push the boundaries of what’s possible. As an early team leader, you’ll have a huge part in shaping our product direction and design culture.

In this role, you’ll collaborate closely with a team of product designers and cross-functional partners to craft the Foundations experiences of today and tomorrow. You’ll lead product designers working on the end-to-end design of new features and improvements across enterprise and consumer mission critical experiences. You’ll help chart our course into the future as we evolve our technology, product, and design paradigms.

This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

• Lead design and help shape product direction across OpenAI’s Foundational Systems across consumer and enterprise on Payments, Identity & Access, and the developer/research tools that power our ecosystem

• Set a high bar for design quality, delivering clear, cohesive experiences that build trust

• Manage and grow a team of product designers, fostering a strong culture of craft, ownership, and performance

• Drive consistency and alignment across complex, interconnected systems

• Identify and prioritize shared capabilities to unlock scale across the OpenAI ecosystem

• Partner closely with engineering, product, and research to shape both long-term strategy and near-term execution

• Use research and insights to deeply understand users and continuously improve the product

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have a passion for turning complexity into usable, beautiful experiences

• Are a strong design leader comfortable with bringing your point of view to a team

• Can coach a team to ship fast while elevating craft and quality. You’re comfortable diving into the details (pixels, edge cases, content) and guiding your team to maintain that level of care as they ship quickly.

• Are ready to rethink the fundamentals from first principles. Many UI patterns were built for a different era and you’re excited to question those assumptions and design interactions that feel native to AI.

• Have a strong portfolio showcasing excellence in designing and shipping at scale, with strengths in user-centered thinking, craft, systems design, and innovative product patterns.

• Have 5+ years of experience managing and growing high-performing product design teams (5–10 designers), with a focus on both craft and systems thinking

• Are comfortable operating across multiple altitudes- from defining design details to shaping system architecture and long-term strategy

• Have experience working on technical, highly cross-functional products, partnering closely with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams. In general, you are excited about building collaborative relationships with many partners!

• Are a systems thinker, able to bring clarity and cohesion across fragmented surfaces and evolve them into unified, scalable experiences.

• Are excited by ambiguous, high-leverage problems and can turn complexity into clear, actionable direction

• Possess excellent communication and storytelling skills, and can align teams around a shared vision

• Get excited about shaping how AI-first products should look and behave

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.

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