About this role
Design professionals who combine deep accessibility expertise with strong visual, interaction, and systems-thinking skills will find a meaningful challenge leading this initiative. OpenAI seeks a practitioner to guide the company-wide accessibility program from within the Design Foundations team, building shared standards and inclusive components that shape how people interact with technology across web, mobile, desktop, voice, AI, and hardware.
The position exists to move accessibility beyond minimum compliance or final reviews, integrating inclusive practices directly into product quality through collaboration with design, engineering, research, and legal teams. Responsibilities require balancing high-level strategy and governance with hands-on product design and participatory research that centers disabled people. An ideal candidate can influence across disciplines without direct authority, establishing durable ownership and practical standards for screen readers, keyboard navigation, and multimodal interactions.
What you will do
- 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 the 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.
- Design for permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities across multiple ways to perceive information and navigate interfaces.
- 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 and accessibility documentation.
What you need
- Must pair deep accessibility expertise with a high bar for design craft, including interaction design, visual design, systems thinking, and prototyping skills.
- Must have led accessibility or inclusive-design work across multiple teams, products, or platforms.
- Must possess deep practical knowledge of WCAG, assistive technologies, accessible interaction design, and platform-specific standards.
- Must have embedded accessibility into design systems, reusable components, and engineering workflows.
- Must have worked directly with disabled people and translated their experiences into meaningful product and organizational decisions.
- Must be able to influence across disciplines without direct authority, creating shared accountability.
Benefits
- Offers Equity
- Relocation assistance to new employees
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
Where is this role located?
This role is based in our San Francisco HQ. We offer relocation assistance to new employees.
What is the compensation for this position?
The salary range is $245K – $310K with offers equity.
What teams will I work with?
You will work across design, engineering, research, product, go-to-market, and legal teams. You will also collaborate closely with the Design Foundations team within Product Design.