Product Designer, Accessibility
OpenAI · San Francisco, United States · 16d ago
About the Team
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Design Systems team creates the foundations that help teams across OpenAI build coherent, high-quality experiences at scale.
Accessibility is fundamental to that work. We’re building the shared standards, components, tools, and practices that make inclusive experiences the default across OpenAI’s products and platforms.
About the Role
In this role, you’ll lead OpenAI’s company-wide accessibility program from within the Design Foundations team within Product Design. You’ll pair strategy and organizational influence with hands-on product design (visual and interaction design) —advocating for disabled people, removing barriers across complete customer journeys, and establishing durable ownership throughout the company.
This is an opportunity to define accessibility for a new generation of products spanning web, mobile, desktop, voice, AI, and hardware. You’ll help teams consider the many ways people perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with technology, going beyond minimum compliance to create experiences that are genuinely useful and inclusive.
Working across design, engineering, research, product, go-to-market, and legal, you’ll make accessibility an expected part of product quality—not a final review or the responsibility of a single expert.
This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.
In this role you will:
Design and ship product experiences while identifying systemic barriers across complete customer journeys.
Define OpenAI’s accessibility strategy, roadmap, governance, priorities, and measures of progress.
Build accessibility into our design system through inclusive components, tokens, interaction patterns, Figma libraries, documentation, and engineering guardrails.
Center disabled people through participatory research, usability studies, and assistive-technology testing rather than relying solely on assumptions, simulations, or automated tools.
Design for permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities, including multiple ways to perceive information, navigate interfaces, understand content, and complete important tasks.
Establish practical standards for screen readers, keyboard navigation, focus, reading order, contrast, typography, motion, captions, forms, errors, and multimodal interactions.
Lead accessibility audits, remediation priorities, launch readiness, and continuous validation across platforms.
Partner with go-to-market, legal, compliance, and product teams on enterprise readiness, accessibility documentation, procurement needs, and customer commitments.
Grow company-wide capability through training, critiques, engineering partnerships, and a network of accessibility champions.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Pair deep accessibility expertise with a very high bar for design craft: strong interaction design, visual design, systems thinking, and prototyping skills
Have led accessibility or inclusive-design work across multiple teams, products, or platforms.
Understand the relationship between accessibility, usability, and inclusive design—and know when to go beyond standards to meet real human needs.
Have deep practical knowledge of WCAG, assistive technologies, accessible interaction design, and platform-specific standards.
Have embedded accessibility into design systems, reusable components, and engineering workflows.
Have worked directly with disabled people and translated their experiences into meaningful product and organizational decisions.
Can identify assumptions and exclusion within a product journey, then turn those insights into clearer and more flexible ways to interact.
Are equally effective setting strategy, designing detailed experiences, and collaborating with engineers through implementation.
Can influence across disciplines without direct authority, creating shared accountability without becoming a centralized approval gate.
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.
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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We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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