Product Designer, Higher Education

About the Team OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Education team is focused on making AI safe, useful, and empowering for students, faculty, and institutions. Our work spans core learning experiences, course-based tools, and campus-wide product solutions. We’re also exploring how OpenAI’s technology can support colleges and universities, educators, teaching and research, and collaborative learning. About the Role We’re looking for a staff-level product designer to shape how students and educators engage with AI and help define OpenAI’s emerging higher education experiences. You’ll work across immediate product needs and ambitious zero-to-one opportunities, from core learning and course experiences to campus-wide tools for teaching, research, and collaboration. A high craft bar is imperative. You’ll be expected to pair exceptional interaction and visual design with deep product thinking—turning complex questions around safety, learning, and institutional needs into experiences that feel clear, trustworthy, and engaging. This is a highly generative role for someone who can move from early exploration to concrete, high-fidelity product direction. You’ll partner closely with product, engineering, research, safety, policy, and design to establish durable patterns for a space that is still being defined. In this role, you will: - Establish an exceptionally high standard for craft across OpenAI’s higher education experiences. - Lead end-to-end design for products that help students, faculty, and campus staff use AI safely, confidently, and productively. - Design clear, trustworthy experiences for learning, course participation, and campus-wide use, including sensitive or high-trust interactions. - Shape zero-to-one higher education experiences spanning colleges and universities, educators, courses, collaborative work, and builder-style workflows. - Turn emerging ideas into compelling concepts, prototypes, and high-fidelity product experiences that teams can evaluate and build. - Partner with research, engineering, product, safety, policy, and design to balance user needs, technical capabilities, and responsible deployment. - Conduct and apply research with relevant users and partners to understand the needs of students, faculty, campus staff, and institutions. - Develop reusable patterns and principles that create coherence across core learning, course, and campus-wide products as the area grows. You might thrive in this role if you: - Bring exceptional interaction and visual design craft and are motivated to raise the quality of design across OpenAI. - Are a highly generative designer who explores broadly, iterates deeply, and turns ideas into concrete, polished product direction. - Pair strong craft with deep product and systems thinking. - Have led substantial, ambiguous, or zero-to-one product areas and can help shape both vision and execution. - Can design thoughtful experiences for sensitive, high-trust, or safety-critical contexts. - Understand how to create products that are engaging and intuitive without compromising safety or clarity. - Can navigate the needs of multiple audiences, including students, faculty, campus staff, administrators, and institutional partners. - Communicate clearly, build alignment across disciplines, and remain hands-on throughout the product-development process. - Are energized by the opportunity to define how AI can support learning while serving higher education communities responsibly. 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. 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 t