Physical Engineering Business Lead (Special Situations)

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. FDE owns problem selection, project scoping, and proposals; you will provide the domain expertise needed to inform those decisions and keep delivery grounded in operating reality. This is a hands-on, customer-facing role at the intersection of manufacturing, AI, deployment, and business development. You will speak the customer’s language, help operators and executives articulate underlying problems, and steer conversations toward work that can deliver meaningful value and is a strong fit for OpenAI. Success means focusing OpenAI on valuable, operationally grounded manufacturing problems; helping FDE make better scoping and proposal decisions; earning customers’ trust in our manufacturing judgment; and turning successful engagements into broader partnerships. Over time, this role could grow into leading OpenAI’s manufacturing practice. 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. 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 mu