Product Design Program Manager

About the team

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Product Design team works across research, engineering, and product to bring OpenAI’s technology to the world through intuitive, responsible, and accessible experiences.

We serve a diverse and growing audience of users—from everyday consumers to developers to large enterprises—and we believe thoughtful design is essential to making powerful AI tools useful and understandable. We seek to learn from real-world deployment and distribute the benefits of AI, while ensuring that this transformative technology is used safely and ethically. Safety is more important to us than unfettered growth.

Design plays a critical role here. To succeed in our mission, it’s essential that our design teams can focus on high-impact work, supported by clear systems, strong execution, and seamless cross-functional collaboration. We’re hiring a Product Design Operations Manager to help build the infrastructure that enables design to thrive. As the first member of the design operations function, you’ll play a foundational role in shaping how the team plans, collaborates, and delivers work across a fast-evolving product landscape.

About the role

We’re looking for an experienced Product Design Operations Manager to help us scale, support, and streamline operations across our growing product design organization. This role is both strategic and hands-on—foundational in shaping how the team operates, and deeply involved in the day-to-day execution that enables great design work to happen.

You’ll work closely with product design leadership, research, engineering, product management, and other partners to ensure the design team can deliver high-quality work at speed and scale. The ideal candidate brings a deep understanding of design operations in high-growth technology organizations, matched with adaptability, attention to detail, and a strong sense of ownership.

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

In this role, you will:

• Partner with design leadership to identify and implement programs, processes, and tools that help the team operate more effectively across multiple product workstreams.

• Lead operational planning and execution for key initiatives, including team-wide rituals, hiring coordination, onboarding, resource allocation, and internal communications.

• Build and maintain scalable systems that support team growth, executional excellence, and strong collaboration with research, engineering, and product counterparts.

• Oversee asset management practices across the design organization, ensuring shared libraries, templates, and systems are version-controlled, accessible, and consistently used.

• Manage external vendors and contractors—handling onboarding, scoping, resourcing, contract workflows, and performance tracking to extend the team’s capacity with quality and accountability.

• Partner closely with Product and Engineering Operations to align OKRs, roadmaps, and delivery milestones.

• Help manage intake, prioritization, and resource planning for design work across a fast-moving and highly collaborative product environment.

• Drive clarity around ownership, roles, and execution timelines—ensuring the right people are in the loop at the right time.

• Facilitate retrospectives, team health check-ins, and continuous improvement efforts to help the team operate at its best.

• Jump in where needed—whether that’s standing up a new system, running a sprint planning session, onboarding a vendor, or troubleshooting a tool.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have 8+ years of experience in design operations roles within high-growth tech environments.

• Have built and scaled 0-1 operational systems across multidisciplinary teams—balancing long-term vision with hands-on execution.

• Have a flexible orientation toward process–understanding when it's most effective, how and when to advocate for it, and what it can't do

• Are deeply familiar with the design and product development process—from early research and concepting through delivery and iteration.

• Have experience managing shared design tools, assets, and libraries to support consistency and efficiency at scale.

• Are skilled at vendor and contractor management, with a focus on enabling seamless collaboration and high-quality outcomes.

• Are highly organized, action-oriented, and comfortable getting in the weeds to get things done.

• Are a strong communicator and collaborator, experienced in working with senior leadership, technical partners, and designers of all levels.

• Thrive in fast-paced environments and enjoy solving problems in real time to help teams move forward.

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.

Qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment in accordance with applicable law, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act. 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.

If you have questions, feedback, or input about this job posting, please reach out to [email protected].

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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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.