Product Design Manager

Details

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.

Responsibilities

• 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

Requirements

• Passion for turning complexity into usable, beautiful experiences
• Strong design leadership and the ability to bring a point of view to a team
• Experience coaching a team to ship quickly while elevating craft and quality; comfortable diving into details (pixels, edge cases, content)
• Willingness to rethink fundamentals from first principles and question assumptions about UI patterns
• Strong portfolio demonstrating excellence in designing and shipping at scale, with strengths in user-centered thinking, craft, systems design, and innovative product patterns
• 5+ years of experience managing and growing high-performing product design teams (5–10 designers), with a focus on both craft and systems thinking
• Comfortable operating across multiple altitudes — from design details to system architecture and long-term strategy
• Experience working on technical, highly cross-functional products, partnering closely with engineering, product, and infrastructure teams
• Systems thinker, able to bring clarity and cohesion across fragmented surfaces and evolve them into unified, scalable experiences
• Excited by ambiguous, high-leverage problems and able to turn complexity into clear, actionable direction
• Excellent communication and storytelling skills, able to align teams around a shared vision
• Interest in 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 AI capabilities 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. To achieve our mission, we value diverse perspectives, voices, and experiences.

OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.

Benefits

• Base pay range: $347,000 – $385,000 (total compensation also includes equity and potential performance-related bonuses)
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays and multiple coordinated company office closures
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend
• Daily meals in offices and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits (charitable donation matching, wellness stipends, etc.)