Product Designer, Design Systems

OpenAI; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 200,000 - 310,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Relocation assistance

Job summary

OpenAI in San Francisco is seeking a Design Systems Lead to evolve ChatGPT’s design foundations at scale. You’ll define principles, patterns, and standards that raise craft and coherence across product teams, guiding typography, spacing, layout, motion, and accessibility.

You will collaborate with research, engineering, product, and design to build a durable, reusable system and translate design judgment into actionable guidance for new experiences across platforms.

Qualifications

• Experience designing and evolving product or design systems at scale.
• Exceptional craft bar and taste with explicit, teachable design judgments.
• Deep knowledge of typography, layout, spacing, accessibility, and interaction design.

Responsibilities

• Define high craft standards and translate them into principles, guidance and examples.
• Own and evolve ChatGPT’s design foundations including typography, sizing, spacing, layout, motion, accessibility, and responsive behavior.
• Establish a shared source of truth across platforms and improve tokens, components, patterns, widgets, and learning experiences.
• Build a comprehensive design systems framework with clear guidance on when and how patterns should be used.
• Translate design judgment into durable standards and test experiences with prototyping and evaluation workflows.
• Identify promising patterns and turn them into reusable, documented foundations.
• Partner with research, engineering, product, and design to evolve the design system and its architecture.
• Help shape new ChatGPT experiences while strengthening the shared design system.

Skills

Design systems

Typography

Layout

Spacing

Accessibility

Prototyping

Cross-functional collaboration

Tools

Figma

Job description

About The Role

In this role, you’ll lead and evolve the design system foundations for ChatGPT. You’ll make nuanced design judgment explicit and usable across product teams, establishing the principles, patterns, and standards that enable coherent, high-quality experiences at scale. A paramount part of this role is raising OpenAI’s craft bar. This work extends beyond maintaining a component library: you’ll define what excellent product design looks and feels like, establish clear guidance for choosing and applying interface patterns, and ensure that new ChatGPT experiences strengthen a coherent system across platforms. Working closely with research, engineering, product, and design, you’ll create a continuous learning loop between design principles, product experiences, evaluation, and evolving technology—shaping a system that becomes more capable and expressive as ChatGPT grows. This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In This Role You Will

• Define an exceptionally high standard for craft and taste, translating that standard into principles, guidance, and examples that elevate the quality of ChatGPT.
• Own and evolve ChatGPT’s design foundations, including typography, sizing, spacing, layout, motion, accessibility, and responsive behavior.
• Establish a shared source of truth across platforms and improve the systems connecting tokens, components, patterns, widgets, learning experiences, and app-like product experiences.
• Build a comprehensive design systems framework with clear, opinionated guidance about when and how product teams should use different interface patterns.
• Translate design judgment into durable standards and use prototyping and evaluation workflows to test experiences, identify recurring issues, and improve the system.
• Identify promising patterns across emerging product experiences and turn them into reusable, documented foundations.
• Partner with research, engineering, product, and design to evolve the design system, its technical architecture, and how it is applied across ChatGPT.
• Help shape new ChatGPT experiences—including shopping, learning, and advanced reasoning—while ensuring their contributions strengthen the shared design system.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Bring an exceptional craft bar and are motivated to raise the quality, clarity, and distinctiveness of design across OpenAI.
• Have sophisticated design taste and can make the judgment behind it explicit, teachable, and actionable for others.
• Have deep experience designing and evolving product or design systems at scale.
• See a design system as a living body of product judgment, not simply a collection of components.
• Have exceptional command of typography, layout, spacing, responsive behavior, accessibility, and interaction design.
• Can move fluently between foundational systems work and concrete, high-craft product experiences.
• Care as much about choosing the right default as designing the full range of possibilities.
• Can explain not only what a pattern should look like, but when a product team should choose it and why.
• Are skilled at turning ambiguous or inconsistent work into a coherent, extensible system.
• Are curious about emerging technology and how design systems can evolve alongside new product capabilities and interaction models.

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…

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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Compensation Range: $200K - $310K