About the team
The Consumer Products team brings OpenAI research into everyday tools used by hundreds of millions of people. We work across design, research, product, and engineering to create interfaces that feel useful, trustworthy, and genuinely new. As model capability increases, product quality depends less on adding controls and more on shaping experiences that help people think, create, and decide well.
We are building a small applied speculative design capability inside consumer products. This practice produces near-term artifacts, prototypes, and interaction studies that make emerging opportunities and failure modes legible before they harden into default product behavior.
About the role
We are looking for an applied speculative design engineer who can move fluidly between concept development, prototyping, and product collaboration. You will design and build high-fidelity generative experience prototypes that test not only what is technically possible, but what is meaningful, humane, and durable at scale.
This role sits at the intersection of design, research, and engineering. You will work with model researchers, product engineers, designers, and policy/legal partners to translate exploratory concepts into concrete product direction. The strongest candidates combine technical execution with judgment across culture, narrative, and human context.
This role is based in Santa Cruz & San Francisco. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance.
In this role you will
- Design and build speculative but shippable prototypes for generative consumer experiences across interaction, workflow, and narrative surfaces.
- Translate ambiguous product questions into concrete artifacts that can be tested with users, researchers, and cross-functional partners.
- Lead expeditionary prototyping sprints that pressure-test assumptions before roadmap commitments.
- Collaborate with researchers and engineers to align interaction concepts with model behavior, reliability constraints, and safety requirements.
- Develop lightweight evaluative methods for experiential quality, including coherence, trust calibration, cognitive load, and long-term usefulness.
- Use writing, visual systems, and demos to communicate design intent, tradeoffs, and strategic implications to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Lead quarterly design fiction projections through artifacts (speculative product portfolios, marketing/advertising campaigns, develop program and capability MacGuffins, internal provocations) based on current model capabilities, research trajectories, contingent social-economic-political trends, factors shaping adoption curves, customer insights, market dynamics, and cultural trends so as to align teams on future opportunities, elevate awareness of uncertainties, seek unseen opportunities, and mitigate risks.
You might thrive in this role if you
- Have 10+ years of experience in product engineering, creative technology, design engineering, HCI research, or related work that combines software craft with product judgment.
- Can rapidly prototype with modern web or product stacks and are comfortable moving from idea to working artifact in days, not quarters.
- Have shipped consumer-facing experiences and can distinguish novelty from durable value.
- Bring a generalist orientation: you can reason across technical systems, user behavior, organizational incentives, and cultural context.
- Have a track record of self-directed work with measurable outcomes, including founder/operator experience, independent practice, or equivalent ownership scope.
- Communicate clearly in writing and live review settings, especially when aligning teams with different assumptions and vocabularies.
Preferred qualifications
- Experience with creative leadership and vision-setting in ambiguous, fast-moving domains, including the ability to inspire and align cross-functional teams around a compelling future direction.
- Skilled at identifying and shaping high-leverage opportunities in the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI, including the ability to navigate technical capabilities, user needs, market dynamics, and cultural trends.
- Evidence of speculative prototyping practice through published artifacts, experiments, essays, exhibitions, open-source work, or internal programs that shaped product direction.
- Depth in at least more than one creative discipline such as photography, filmmaking, writing, editorial practice, physical computing, or maker culture.
- Evidence of a multi-path and multidisciplinary background that combines technical, creative, and cultural fluencies, such as a portfolio of work that includes both code and creative artifacts, or a career path that spans different industries or roles.
- Time spent outside of traditional tech environments, such as in academia, the arts, social impact, entrepreneurship, or other fields that require self-direction and creative problem-solving.
- Experience with generative AI product development, prompt/system behavior design, and interaction patterns for model-mediated workflows.
- Experience conducting or partnering on qualitative research and turning findings into product and engineering decisions.
- Comfort working in early, ambiguous domains where the right framing is as important as the right implementation.
Education & Experience
- BA/BS, MS, PhD or equivalent experience in Computer Science, Design, HCI, Media Arts, Architecture, Social Science, or related interdisciplinary fields are recognized but not required to apply.
- Interdisciplinarians with equivalent experience across technical, creative, and cultural domains are especially encouraged to apply.
- Equivalent paths are welcome, including entrepreneurial practice, community-led initiatives, or non-traditional technical/creative careers with clear evidence of impact.
- Portfolio or work samples showing end-to-end ownership: framing, artifact creation, technical implementation, and product influence.
Additional requirements
- This role is based in Santa Cruz, CA and San Francisco, CA. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week.
- Relocation assistance is available for new hires.
- OpenAI provides visa sponsorship and supports transfers where feasible.
- Must be able to work effectively across engineering, design, product, policy, legal, and go-to-market functions.
Pay transparency
The base salary range for this role is $380,000–$460,000. In addition, this role is eligible for equity and benefits.
More context
Notices
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