Lead Industrial Designer, Robotics

About the Team

Our Robotics team is focused on unlocking general-purpose robotics and pushing towards AGI-level intelligence in dynamic, real-world settings. Working across the entire model stack, we integrate cutting-edge hardware and software to explore a broad range of robotic form factors. We strive to seamlessly blend high-level AI capabilities with the constraints of physical systems to improve peoples’ lives.

About the Role

We are seeking a Lead Product & Industrial Designer to help define the visual identity, form language, and physical expression of our robotic products. You will work closely with leadership, product, and engineering teams to shape how our systems look, feel, and communicate their capabilities through industrial design.

This role spans concept development, industrial design, surface development, and product definition. You will help establish a cohesive design language across robotic platforms while balancing aesthetics, usability, manufacturability, and engineering constraints. Unlike traditional industrial design roles that focus primarily on concept generation and visualization, you will be expected to create production-intent digital assets and geometry that can be directly integrated into engineering workflows.

You will play a central role in shaping the physical experience of future robotic systems and ensuring that design intent remains intact from concept through implementation.

This role is based in San Francisco, CA. This role will be expected to be in office 4 days per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will

• Define and evolve the visual identity, form language, and design principles of robotic products and supporting hardware systems.
• Create sketches, renderings, digital concepts, and physical prototypes to communicate design intent and explore new product directions.
• Develop production-intent surface geometry and digital assets that can be integrated directly into engineering CAD workflows.
• Partner closely with product, engineering, and leadership teams to translate product goals into compelling physical designs.
• Drive industrial design decisions across the product development lifecycle, balancing aesthetics, functionality, manufacturability, and system constraints.
• Collaborate with mechanical engineers to ensure design intent is preserved throughout development and manufacturing.
• Conduct design reviews and provide feedback on proportion, surface quality, form, fit-and-finish, and overall product experience.
• Support rapid concept exploration and iteration through physical and digital prototyping.
• Establish and maintain design standards, workflows, and best practices for industrial design and surface development.
• Help define the long-term design vision for future robotic products and hardware platforms.

You might thrive in this role if you

• Have exceptional taste and strong intuition for proportion, form, surface quality, and physical product design.
• Enjoy collaborating closely with engineers and can comfortably navigate both design and technical constraints.
• Are capable of moving from ambiguous product concepts to detailed, production-ready design assets.
• Think systematically about how design choices influence usability, manufacturability, and product perception.
• Are excited about helping define the identity of an entirely new class of products.

Preferred qualifications

• Extensive experience designing consumer electronics, robotics products, transportation products, advanced hardware systems, or other highly refined physical products.
• Strong portfolio demonstrating excellence in industrial design, form development, visual storytelling, and physical product execution.
• Experience creating CAD geometry, Class A surfaces, or production-intent digital assets that can be directly consumed by engineering teams.
• Proficiency with industry-standard design and surface development tools such as Alias, NX, Rhino, Blender, Gravity Sketch, or equivalent.
• Experience working closely with hardware engineering teams from concept development through manufacturing.

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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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.