Product Designer, Higher Education

Openai
San Francisco, CA
HybridCareer-pivot friendly

Who this role is best for

Strong fit for product designers with a background in higher education who can balance complex safety and institutional needs with creative, user-centric design.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with experience in shaping zero-to-one educational products and balancing user needs with safety and technical constraints
    — “shape zero-to-one higher education experiences spanning colleges and universities”
  • Designers who have led ambiguous or unproven product areas and can define both vision and execution
    — “Have led substantial, ambiguous, or zero-to-one product areas and can help shape both vision and execution”
  • Individuals with a track record of creating clear, trustworthy experiences in high-trust or safety-critical contexts
    — “design thoughtful experiences for sensitive, high-trust, or safety-critical contexts”

Things to consider

  • Candidates must be prepared to navigate complex institutional needs and collaborate with multiple disciplines
    — “Partner with research, engineering, product, safety, policy, and design to balance user needs”
  • The role requires a high level of design craft and the ability to deliver polished, high-fidelity product direction
    — “A high craft bar is imperative. You’ll be expected to pair exceptional interaction and visual design”

How to stand out

  • Highlight experience with end-to-end design in ambiguous or unproven product areas
    — “Lead end-to-end design for products that help students, faculty, and campus staff use AI safely”
  • Showcase ability to create reusable design patterns for complex systems and learning environments
    — “Develop reusable patterns and principles that create coherence across core learning”
  • Emphasize work that balances user engagement with safety and clarity in high-trust contexts
    — “create products that are engaging and intuitive without compromising safety or clarity”
Pace · SteadyCollaboration · HighAutonomy · MediumDecision Impact · Company

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • successful product launches
  • positive user feedback
Typical background
product designhigher education technology

Skills & requirements

Required

Product DesignHigher EducationAI IntegrationUser ExperienceProduct Vision

Preferred

Educational TechnologyAI Ethics

About the role

Original posting from Openai via Ashby

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 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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241.

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf

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.

Source: Openai careers (Ashby)

Similar roles

More roles at OpenAI