Creative Operations Lead

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.

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, and process and tool optimization. You will develop strategic solutions that solve current project needs and anticipate future challenges.

Responsibilities

• Assess Projects: 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 and capacity planning to roadmap planning, scoping, and delivery.
• Build Relationships: Foster strong connections with stakeholders to understand company goals and 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 to fine-tune 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.

Minimum Qualifications

• 15+ years of experience in relevant creative group management from a creative agency, production studio, or on the client side.
• Proven experience in managing individuals, projects, and cross-functional teams effectively and inclusively.
• Strong leadership skills with the ability to implement systems and affect positive change.
• Ability to balance long-term strategic thinking with effective near-term execution.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Strong problem-solving skills with the ability to navigate ambiguity.
• Experience implementing innovative systems, frameworks, and tools to improve delivery.
• Proficiency with program/project management and design system tools (e.g., Airtable, Asana, Figma).
• Ability to thrive in a high-growth, evolving environment with sound judgment and adaptability.
• Meticulous attention to detail and high standards for quality.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience leveraging AI technologies to improve workflow and enable best practices.

Compensation and Benefits

• Salary Range: $190,000 – $240,000
• Equity: Offers generous equity options.
• Benefits:
  • Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family.
  • Mental health and wellness support.
  • 401(k) plan with 50% matching.
  • Unlimited time off and 13 company holidays per year.
  • Paid parental leave (24 weeks for birth-parent leave and 20 weeks for parental leave).
  • Family-planning support.
  • Annual learning and development stipend of $1,500.