Product Engineering Business Lead

Compensation

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. The salary range for this position is $333K - $370K, with generous equity, performance-related bonuses, and the following benefits:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends

About the Team

OpenAI's Product Design & Manufacturing (PD&M) vertical works with customers across the product lifecycle, from product engineering to the factory floor. We help manufacturers identify and deploy high-value applications of frontier AI that shorten product development cycles, improve product performance, reduce waste, increase factory uptime, and improve output and yield.

About the Role

We are hiring a Manufacturing Expert to bring deep factory-operations expertise and commercial judgment to customer engagements. You will lead early discovery and advise Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) and account teams on factory context, opportunity fit, and potential impact. This is a hands-on, customer-facing role at the intersection of manufacturing, AI, deployment, and business development.

Key Responsibilities

• Join and help lead early customer conversations and workshops, bringing relevant manufacturing context to operators, technical leaders, and senior executives.
• Surface and frame high-value manufacturing problems, then advise FDE and account teams on likely fit, impact, constraints, and adoption considerations.
• Partner with FDE and customer teams throughout delivery to keep solutions grounded in operational reality, identify manufacturing risks early, and support adoption and measurable customer value.
• Serve as the manufacturing expert in the room, bringing credibility across factory processes, production systems, operational constraints, and business tradeoffs.
• Help win and expand strategic partnerships by shaping account strategy, executive engagement, compelling use cases, buyer narratives, and credible commercial paths.
• Establish a clear operating cadence across priority manufacturing pursuits and deployments, with explicit owners, capacity tradeoffs, risks, decisions, and measures of success.
• Turn lessons from customer and factory-floor work into reusable discovery methods, launch standards, product-feedback loops, and recommendations for product, go-to-market, partnerships, and enablement.
• Develop relationships across priority sectors, including automotive, industrial and agricultural equipment, and consumer electronics.
• Operate with high agency and low ego, moving fluidly between executive conversations, working sessions, analysis, writing, and delivery follow-through.

Qualifications

• Deep expertise in manufacturing processes and factory operations, with the credibility to speak the customer's language and challenge assumptions.
• A track record of operating factories or complex production environments, or directly implementing manufacturing solutions with customers.
• Strong technology and AI fluency, along with the learning agility to operate effectively in a fast-moving frontier-technology environment.
• Excellent discovery and problem-framing skills, including the ability to help customers articulate ambiguous operational needs and advise FDE on fit and impact.
• The ability to partner credibly with FDE and other technical teams while respecting their ownership of problem selection, scoping, proposals, and architecture.
• Evidence of commercial impact in complex technical or industrial environments, including earning executive trust, shaping account strategy, challenging risky or low-value work, and helping win or expand partnerships.
• High agency, low ego, sound judgment, and a willingness to do the detailed work required to move outcomes forward.
• Clear, concise communication and exceptional follow-through across factory operators, senior executives, account teams, and cross-functional technical partners.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with product development, product design, or simulation workflows, including relevant tools, systems, and processes.
• Experience with supply-chain processes, systems, or workflows.
• A degree in engineering, physics, or a related technical field.