Creative Operations Lead

About the Team

The OpenAI Comms Design Team / Design Studio is responsible for telling OpenAI’s story and educating the world about our values, research, and products. Our goal is to do it beautifully, accessibly, and with transparency and authenticity.

Our in-house creative and design studio plays a crucial role in infusing clarity into our communications, serving as a bridge across all company teams to craft authentic experiences. This fosters connections with our diverse stakeholders at every touchpoint. 

The dedicated team within this studio includes designers, creatives, producers, front-end, and full-stack engineers, who work collaboratively across all non-product surfaces, such as openai.com, ensuring a cohesive and impactful presentation of our products, research and brand.

Communicating the advances and benefits of AGI is one of the most important works at OpenAI, and our goal is to do it beautifully, accessibly, and with transparency and authenticity.

About the Role

The Comms Design Team is looking for a dynamic leader with a strategic mindset, exceptional organizational skills, and the ability to build strong relationships across functions to ensure that our creative operations run smoothly, efficiently, and with a high level of excellence.

As the Creative Operations Lead, you will spearhead our talent and resource management across our internal team and external creative network. Your focus will be establishing and directing workflows that ensure creative and design innovation, resource management, process and tool optimization. You will develop strategic solutions that solve current project needs and anticipate future challenges.

In this role, you will:

• Assess Projects: Independently evaluate project requirements against comprehensive, cross-functional creative briefs, making casting and process decisions that benefit work outcomes.

• Drive Innovation: Develop new team structures, workflows, and innovative approaches to address complex creative challenges and facilitate a functioning, healthy group.

• Develop Standards: Establish standards across production, design, and engineering functions in the group to foster best practices, from team planning, capacity planning to roadmap planning, scoping to delivery.

• Build Relationships: Foster strong connections with stakeholders to understand company goals, as well as with all team members to understand their bandwidth, skills and experience, ensuring optimal project assignments. 

• Direct Resource Management: Manage resources across the group, including creative/design, production, and engineering team members, and for all contractors. Proactively source top talent to resourcing problems for both current and future projects.

• Plan Capacity: Track and report on resource capacity planning. Use knowledge to support long-term planning by group leaders and other company stakeholders, building teams, frameworks, and systems that best enable key initiatives, campaigns, and projects.

• Support Onboarding and Recruitment: Ensure the smooth onboarding and immersion of new hires, acting as the glue between all parties. Facilitate contractor engagement, including handling the recruitment and coordination of interviews and meetings, candidate outreach, and the management of contractor relationships.

• Manage Budgets: Oversee production budgets, collaborating closely with Executive Producers to ensure responsible budget management practices that enable a high level of craftsmanship, including contractor or vendor fees.

• Improve Processes and Tools: Develop and teach processes for efficient organizational planning workflows. Lead across functions to simplify, unify, and streamline processes and tools in order to finetune productivity and ensure industry-leading creative output. Monitor the effectiveness of the production toolset (e.g. Airtable, Asana, Google Drive) to optimize when needed. 

• Coordinate Reporting and Analytics: Manage reporting on team output and key metrics based on knowledge from work plans and analyzed data. Synthesize and share learnings to ensure group leads and producer functions implement recommended improvements.

You might thrive in this role if you:

• Have Extensive Experience: Bring 15+ years of experience in relevant creative group management from a creative agency, production studio, or on the client side.

• Demonstrate Effective Team Management Skills: Have proven experience in managing individuals, projects, and cross-functional teams effectively and inclusively towards positive outcomes.

• Demonstrate Strong Leadership: Show ability to affect positive change and implement systems, whether for individuals or an entire group/organization.

• Balance Strategic and Tactical Focus: Combine long-term strategic thinking with effective near-term execution skills in tracking, reporting, and process improvement.

• Have Excellent Communication Skills: Demonstrate the ability to articulate complex ideas clearly and concisely with written and verbal communication to all team functions and peers, as well as the ability to present work influentially to stakeholders.

• Excel in Proactive Problem-Solving: Demonstrate the ability to navigate ambiguity through strong analysis and risk management in order to deliver thoughtful, effective solutions at the interpersonal or team/group level.

• Innovate and Implement Systems: Direct adoption of new methods, approaches, frameworks, and technologies to improve delivery. 

• Exhibit Strategic Influence: Collect, organize, and interpret data to guide group decision making, inform pivots, and communicate context. Consistently bring new perspectives to encourage others to sharpen approaches.

• Leverage Tool Optimization: Enhance efficiency through the use of program / project management and design system tools, such as Airtable, Asana, and Figma, including ability to quickly learn and adapt new ones.

• Enable Excellence: Take ownership of delivery by structuring and implementing large-scale initiatives to enable successful outcomes that exceed expectations. 

• Show Adaptability: Thrive in a high-growth, ambiguous, and constantly evolving environment, demonstrating sound judgement despite fast pace.

• Pay Attention to Detail: Have meticulous attention to detail, organizational skills, and a strong appreciation for best-in-class design, ensuring high standards of accuracy and quality in project deliverables.

• Use Technology to Innovate: Demonstrate your capability to innovate methods and systems in part by understanding and using AI technologies to build frameworks and tools that improve workflow. Quickly learn and integrate new technical innovations continuously to enable industry-leading best practices.

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 do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability or any other legally protected status. 

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For US Based Candidates: Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.

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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.