Physical Engineering Business Lead (Special Situations)

About this role

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