Physical Engineering Business Lead

About the Team

OpenAI’s Physical Engineering work explores how frontier AI can help people design, simulate, and build better physical products. We work directly with customers to identify high-value engineering applications that shorten development cycles, improve product performance, and create measurable business value.

About the Role

We are hiring a Physical Engineering Business Lead to bring firsthand product engineering experience into our customer work. You’ll combine deep familiarity with CAD, simulation, or related engineering tools with the ability to lead customer discovery, explain complex ideas clearly, and turn promising use cases into high-impact projects.

This is a hands-on, customer-facing role. You’ll work closely with customer engineering teams, senior leaders, forward-deployed engineers (FDEs), and account teams from early discovery through delivery. You’ll help frame valuable design and simulation problems, guide projects with practical engineering judgment, and support adoption and measurable outcomes.

You’ll also turn what we learn from customers into product feedback, reusable delivery methods, and recommendations for our go-to-market and partnership strategies. As the work grows, this role may evolve into broader practice leadership.

Key Responsibilities

Lead discovery and workshops with customer engineering teams and senior leaders to identify high-value design and simulation use cases

Develop promising use cases into significant projects with FDE and account teams, forming clear hypotheses about value, feasibility, engineering constraints, and adoption

Work alongside FDEs and customer teams through delivery, bringing practical engineering context, surfacing risks early, and helping projects achieve measurable outcomes

Explain how AI can improve physical-product engineering, grounded in real experience with CAD, simulation, engineering workflows, and design tradeoffs

Build customer confidence through clear technical storytelling, compelling use cases, and credible engineering judgment

Maintain a clear operating cadence across priority projects, with explicit owners, risks, decisions, and success measures

Turn customer insights into reusable discovery methods, FDE guidance, product feedback, and recommendations for our product, go-to-market, and partnership strategies

Build relationships across physical-product engineering teams and the broader design and simulation ecosystem

Move fluidly between executive conversations, technical working sessions, analysis, writing, and delivery follow-through

Qualifications

Firsthand experience designing or building physical products, including substantial hands-on work with CAD, simulation, or related engineering tools

Deep understanding of engineering workflows and tradeoffs, with clear examples of your personal contributions and their impact on products or projects

Strong discovery and problem-framing skills, including the ability to connect engineering details to customer needs and business value

The ability to work directly with FDEs and customer technical teams, contribute practical engineering judgment, and stay engaged through implementation

Strong customer presence and the ability to explain complex technical ideas clearly to senior leaders

Technical curiosity and the ability to learn quickly in a fast-moving environment; prior AI experience is not required

High agency, low ego, sound judgment, and a willingness to do the detailed work needed to move outcomes forward

Clear communication and reliable follow-through across technical, commercial, and executive teams

Preferred Qualifications

A background in mechanical engineering or a closely related discipline

Consulting, founder, partnership, or other customer-facing experience that complements direct engineering work

Experience working in high-bar, technology-forward physical-product engineering environments

Experience translating customer or engineering insights into repeatable methods, product feedback, or go-to-market strategy

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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