The posting
About the Team
The Physical Engineering team sits within OpenAI’s Enterprise Verticals organization. We’re exploring how frontier AI can help people design, simulate, and build better physical products - shortening development cycles, improving product performance, and expanding what engineering teams can accomplish.
We’re building experiences within ChatGPT and integrations with tools such as CAD, eCAD, CAE, and simulation software to support engineers from early concepts through design, validation, and preparation for production.
We operate as a small founding team, working directly with customers and closely with research, product, data science, and forward-deployed engineering. We learn by building, putting products in users’ hands, and using their feedback to guide what comes next.
About the Role
We’re looking for a highly autonomous Product Designer to become the first dedicated designer on the Physical Engineering team. You’ll help define this product area from its earliest stages - shaping what we build, how it works, and how design operates within the team.
This is a hands-on, zero-to-one role for someone with a founder’s mindset. You’ll work deeply with engineers and customers to understand complex technical workflows, identify valuable opportunities, and turn emerging AI capabilities into intuitive, trustworthy products. You’ll move between product strategy, interaction design, prototyping, research, and detailed execution, often making decisions with incomplete information.
While your initial focus may be Physical Engineering, your work could extend across Enterprise Verticals as the design function grows. You’ll help establish reusable patterns and a high bar for craft across specialized AI products.
This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role, you will:
- Define the product and design vision for AI-powered physical-engineering experiences.
- Lead design from customer discovery and early prototyping through detailed execution, launch, and iteration.
- Create intuitive interfaces that help engineers understand, inspect, and refine complex designs, simulations, and model outputs.
- Work directly with mechanical, electrical, and other physical engineers to understand their tools, constraints, and workflows.
- Partner closely with product, engineering, research, data science, and forward-deployed teams to translate emerging AI capabilities into practical products.
- Prototype new interaction models for visual, spatial, and technically complex work.
- Balance speed and exploration with a high bar for interaction design, visual craft, reliability, and user trust.
- Establish foundational design patterns and practices that can scale across Physical Engineering and other enterprise verticals.
- Operate independently, identify the highest-leverage opportunities, and bring clarity to an exceptionally early and ambiguous product space.
You might thrive in this role if you:
- Have independently led substantial zero-to-one products from early exploration through launch.
- Bring exceptional product judgment, interaction design, and visual craft to complex professional software.
- Are highly autonomous and comfortable defining both the problem and the path forward.
- Think and operate like a founder: learning quickly, making pragmatic decisions, and remaining accountable for outcomes.
- Enjoy working directly with highly technical users and translating specialized workflows into clear product experiences.
- Can move fluidly between long-term vision, systems thinking, rapid prototyping, and detailed execution.
- Build alignment through compelling prototypes, clear narratives, and close cross-functional collaboration.
- Are energized by unfamiliar domains and can develop enough technical depth to make thoughtful design decisions.
- Want to help establish the design culture and foundations of a new team.
Particularly relevant experience includes:
- Designing CAD, CAE, eCAD, simulation, chip-design, manufacturing, or other engineering software.
- Building interactive tools for visual, spatial, data-intensive, or technically complex workflows.
- Designing professional or enterprise products that integrate with established tools and systems.
- Working as a founding designer, early startup designer, or first designer within a new product area.
- Designing AI-powered products and evaluating whether their outputs are understandable, useful, and reliable.
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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.
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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