Design Leadership Jobs in California (NOW HIRING)

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. Our product teams work across research, engineering, product, data, and design to bring OpenAI’s technology to people and businesses around the world.

Design plays a critical role in making powerful AI intuitive, useful, and trustworthy. We hold a high bar for quality and build experiences that earn users’ confidence, while moving quickly and learning from real-world feedback. We favor early validation and continuous refinement over waiting until every detail is perfect.

We’re looking for a Product Design Leader to shape how startups, small businesses, and growing teams discover, adopt, and unlock lasting value from Codex and ChatGPT. You’ll lead design across the B2B growth journey, creating experiences that turn the potential of AI into meaningful, everyday impact for this user base.

This role is a mix of team leadership and hands‑on design execution. You’ll lead and develop a small team of designers, contribute directly to high‑impact projects, and help set the standard for impactful, simple, user‑centric experiences. You balance exceptional craft with momentum, creating a culture where the team launches, learns, and improves quickly. You already use tools such as Codex to extend what you can build. As a leader, you help designers strengthen their judgment, confidence, and influence through clear and actionable feedback. You’re also a highly‑effective cross‑functional partner who brings people together, navigates ambiguity, and builds alignment through clear communication and collaborative problem‑solving.

Codex is on an extraordinary trajectory, and this role offers a rare opportunity to work across both sides of the product: the consumer experiences through which people first discover and adopt our technology, and the business experiences that help teams use it together. You’ll bring a high bar for craft, strong product judgment, and comfort using data to guide decisions without losing sight of the human experience.

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

• Lead design for growth experiences across Codex and ChatGPT for our Business users.


• Manage, mentor, and develop a small team (2–5+) of product designers, creating a culture of craft, ownership, candid feedback, and high performance.


• Operate as a hands‑on design leader, taking on select projects and contributing directly at important moments.


• Set a high bar for product quality across interaction design, visual craft, systems thinking, content, and end‑to‑end experience.


• Partner closely with product, engineering, data science, research, and go‑to‑market teams to shape strategy and execution.


• Design and improve experiences across discovery, onboarding, activation, engagement, collaboration, conversion, and retention.


• Use quantitative data, experimentation, research, and qualitative insights to identify opportunities and evaluate outcomes.


• Translate complex and rapidly evolving AI capabilities into clear, approachable experiences for people with a wide range of technical expertise.


• Move fluidly between long‑term product vision and fast, iterative execution.


• Help define what AI‑native growth experiences should look, feel, and behave like.

• Have a portfolio demonstrating exceptional product thinking, interaction design, and visual craft across complex, shipped products.


• Are a player‑coach who enjoys developing other designers while remaining close to the details of the work.


• Have managed product designers, or are a senior design leader who has meaningfully mentored others, led complex initiatives, and raised the quality of a broader team.


• Can coach designers to move quickly while maintaining a high bar for clarity, coherence, and craft.


• Are fluent in using AI as part of how you explore, prototype, communicate, and create.


• Are comfortable working with data and experiments, and can balance quantitative signals with research, judgment, and design intuition.


• Possess strong product judgment and can connect user needs, business goals, and technical possibilities.


• Can turn ambiguous, fast‑moving problems into a clear vision and actionable direction.


• Communicate clearly and can align teams around a compelling product narrative.


• Are excited to rethink established patterns and invent interactions that feel native to AI.


• Thrive in highly collaborative environments and enjoy partnering closely with engineering, product, research, and data teams.


• Care deeply about building products that are useful, trustworthy, and worthy of users’ time.

Direct experience in growth design, developer products, or people management is welcome but not required. We’re open to experienced design managers as well as exceptional senior individual contributors who have demonstrated strong mentorship, leadership, and team‑level impact.

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 Aff…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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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.