Art Director, Research Team

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI, Inc. is seeking a hands-on Art Director to partner with the Research team on creative concepts, visual direction, and design. You’ll help define how research stories look and feel, developing ideas and carrying them into compelling visual work.

You’ll collaborate with researchers, filmmakers, designers, and marketing partners across web, social, film, editorial, and experiences. This role requires strong hands-on craft, a distinct creative point of view, and the ability to navigate

Qualifications

• 5+ years with art direction and graphic design.
• Strong visual storytelling and concept development.
• Experience translating research concepts into visuals.
• Ability to lead and collaborate with cross-functional teams.

Responsibilities

• Partner with researchers and creative teams to define visual direction for research stories, demos, and announcements.
• Translate research concepts into clear visual storytelling using imagery, typography, and motion.
• Art direct and design across web, social, film, editorial, and experiences, providing briefs and feedback while staying hands-on.
• Create prototypes and visual systems that carry ideas across formats with researchers.
• Manage multiple creative requests, align priorities, and adapt to changing goals and timelines.

Skills

Art direction

Graphic design

Job description

About the Team

OpenAI didn’t begin as a traditional company. It began as an idea: that artificial intelligence could be developed in a way that benefits everyone. As a creative team, our role is to help make sure the work behind that idea is understood, as it leaves the lab and meets the world.

This company works at the frontier of intelligence. Like any frontier, it’s unfinished, constantly shifting, and still being explored. Our job is to stay close to that uncertainty and help shape how this story gets told, in a way that feels grounded and human. We do this through campaigns, launches, films, brand systems, and work that doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories yet. This team is for people who want to help shape something from the beginning.

About the Role

OpenAI is seeking a hands‑on Art Director to partner with the Research team on creative concepts, visual direction, and design. You’ll help define how research stories look and feel, developing ideas and carrying them into compelling visual work. Working directly with researchers, you’ll keep scientific accuracy and clarity central to the creative approach, while finding distinctive ways to capture people’s attention and imagination.

You’ll collaborate with filmmakers, designers, and marketing and creative partners across web, social, film, editorial, and experiences. Your work may range from developing a visual concept and art directing collaborators to designing assets yourself. You’ll create treatments, references, and explorations that establish a clear direction, then help carry that direction through production and final delivery.

This role suits a versatile art director with strong hands‑on design craft, a distinct creative point of view, and an interest in AI research. You can move between the overall visual idea and the details of execution, build cohesive visual systems, and give collaborators clear, constructive feedback. You should be comfortable navigating ambiguity and adapting your approach to an evolving research agenda.

In this role, you will:

• Partner with researchers and creative teams to understand priorities, develop original concepts, and define the visual direction for research stories, announcements, and demos; communicate ideas through treatments, mood boards, references, and design explorations

• Translate complex research concepts, methods, and findings into clear, compelling visual storytelling, choosing imagery, typography, composition, and motion that serve the idea and accurately represent the underlying work

• Art direct and design across web, social, film, editorial, and experiences; guide the look and feel through collaboration with filmmakers, designers, animators, illustrators, and other creative partners, providing clear briefs and feedback while staying hands‑on with execution

• Create prototypes and reusable visual systems that carry a creative idea across formats; collaborate with researchers on narratives and demos, and explore visual approaches for film graphics, imagery, and environments that bring research capabilities to life

• Carry visual direction from concept through delivery, reviewing work for craft, consistency, and clarity; manage multiple creative requests with partners, align on priorities, and adapt to changing research goals and production timelines

You might thrive in this role if you:

• 5+ years of experience in both art direction and graphic design, with a portfolio demonstrating original concepts, a strong visual point of view, and high-quality execution; clearly show your role in shaping the direction and making the work

• Can establish a compelling visual direction and develop it into cohesive systems across formats, balancing consistency with the needs of each story and medium

• Bring strong hands‑on craft in typography, layout, composition, color, imagery, and information design, with an eye for how these elements work together in static and moving images

• Can turn an ambiguous brief into a clear creative approach, present and explain your ideas, and guide execution as technical concepts and project needs evolve

• Have an experimental nature, a broad range of visual references, and the ability to explore different approaches before refining the strongest idea

• Have an interest in AI research and can ask thoughtful questions to understand unfamiliar ideas and preserve their meaning

• Collaborate effectively with researchers, filmmakers, marketers, and creative partners; give thoughtful art direction and actionable feedback, and are comfortable both leading visual work and contributing hands‑on to a shared creative vision

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 Affi….

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