Product Designer, Accessibility

Details

OpenAI's Design Systems team creates the foundations that help teams build coherent, high-quality experiences at scale. The accessibility program establishes shared standards, components, tools, and practices that make inclusive experiences the default across OpenAI's products and platforms.

This role will lead OpenAI's company-wide accessibility program from within Design Foundations, combining strategy and organizational influence with hands-on product design. The work includes advocating for disabled people, removing barriers across complete customer journeys, and establishing durable accessibility ownership throughout the company.

The role covers products spanning web, mobile, desktop, voice, AI, and hardware. It involves working across design, engineering, research, product, go-to-market, and legal to make accessibility an expected part of product quality.

Responsibilities

• Define OpenAI's accessibility strategy, roadmap, governance, priorities, and measures of progress.
• Design and ship accessible experiences while identifying systemic barriers across complete customer journeys.
• Build accessibility into the design system through inclusive components, tokens, interaction patterns, Figma libraries, documentation, and engineering guardrails.
• Center disabled people through participatory research, usability studies, and assistive-technology testing rather than relying solely on assumptions, simulations, or automated tools.
• Design for permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities, including multiple ways to perceive information, navigate interfaces, understand content, and complete important tasks.
• Establish practical standards for screen readers, keyboard navigation, focus, reading order, contrast, typography, motion, captions, forms, errors, and multimodal interactions.
• Lead accessibility audits, remediation priorities, launch readiness, and continuous validation across platforms.
• Partner with go-to-market, legal, compliance, and product teams on enterprise readiness, accessibility documentation, procurement needs, and customer commitments.
• Grow company-wide capability through training, critiques, engineering partnerships, and a network of accessibility champions.

Requirements

• Experience leading accessibility or inclusive-design work across multiple teams, products, or platforms.
• Deep accessibility expertise combined with strong interaction design, systems thinking, and a high bar for product craft.
• Understanding of the relationship between accessibility, usability, and inclusive design, including when to go beyond standards to meet real human needs.
• Deep practical knowledge of WCAG, assistive technologies, accessible interaction design, and platform-specific standards.
• Experience embedding accessibility into design systems, reusable components, and engineering workflows.
• Experience working directly with disabled people and translating their experiences into meaningful product and organizational decisions.
• Ability to identify assumptions and exclusion within a product journey and turn those insights into clearer and more flexible ways to interact.
• Ability to set strategy, design detailed experiences, and collaborate with engineers through implementation.
• Ability to influence across disciplines without direct authority and create shared accountability without becoming a centralized approval gate.

Benefits

• Base salary of $245,000–$310,000 per year.
• Equity and performance-related bonuses for eligible employees.
• Medical, dental, and vision insurance, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts.
• Pre-tax accounts for health and dependent care expenses, as well as commuter expenses.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match.
• Paid parental, medical, and caregiver leave.
• Paid time off, paid company holidays, office closures, and paid sick or safe time as required by applicable law.
• 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.

The role is based at OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters and offers relocation assistance to new employees. OpenAI is an equal opportunity employer and provides reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities.