Six Figure Work

Motion Designer

OpenAI

Company websiteopenai.com (OpenAI, opens in new tab)

Base salary $223K  to $247K

Employer-published annual base salary, USD. Advertised base range in San Francisco, CA

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  • LocationSan Francisco, CA
  • WorkplaceHybrid
  • Status at last checkSource accepting applications when checked
  • Last checked (3 h ago) · observed since

About this job

About the Team

OpenAI didn’t begin as a traditional company. It began as an idea: that artificial intelligence could be developed in a way that benefits everyone. As a creative team, our role is to help make sure the work behind that idea is understood, as it leaves the lab and meets the world.

This company works at the frontier of intelligence. Like any frontier, it’s unfinished, constantly shifting, and still being explored. Our job is to stay close to that uncertainty and help shape how this story gets told, in a way that feels grounded and human. We do this through campaigns, launches, films, brand systems, and work that doesn’t fit neatly into any of those categories yet. This team is for people who want to help shape something from the beginning.

About the Role

OpenAI is seeking a Motion Designer to help tell the stories behind our research. You’ll translate complex ideas, emerging capabilities, and the work of our researchers into clear, engaging motion across films, launches, demos, and other communications.

Working within the creative team, you’ll partner with Research, Brand, and production teams to shape work from early concepts through final delivery. You’ll help determine what a story needs visually, explore different approaches, and bring those ideas to life through thoughtful design and animation.

This is a hands-on role for someone with strong motion craft, curiosity about unfamiliar subjects, and the ability to find a compelling visual approach when the brief is still taking shape. You’ll contribute to how OpenAI’s research is expressed in motion, developing original work and reusable approaches that help the team build on what it learns.

In this role, you will:

  • Develop motion concepts for research stories, working with creative partners and subject matter experts to understand the ideas and identify how best to communicate them.

  • Design and produce high-quality 2D and 3D motion for research films, launches, demos, and supporting content.

  • Apply and extend OpenAI’s visual and motion language, balancing consistency with the needs of each story.

  • Take work from visual exploration, storyboards, and animatics through animation, compositing, and final delivery.

  • Collaborate closely with designers, filmmakers, editors, producers, and researchers, bringing a motion perspective into the creative process early.

  • Translate technical or abstract concepts into visual sequences that are accessible to a broad audience while preserving the meaning of the underlying work.

  • Work with producers to scope projects, communicate dependencies, and maintain a high standard of craft as priorities and timelines evolve.

  • Present work clearly, explain creative decisions, and incorporate feedback from creative and technical partners.

  • Develop reusable assets, templates, and workflows where they improve quality and make recurring work easier to produce.

You might thrive in this role if you have:

  • 7+ years of experience in motion design across films, campaigns, launches, or other narrative work.

  • A strong portfolio demonstrating design judgment, animation craft, and the ability to carry an idea from concept through finished execution.

  • The ability to explore an open-ended brief, propose a clear creative direction, and refine it through collaboration.

  • Proficiency in After Effects and experience with Cinema 4D or comparable 3D tools, alongside editing and compositing workflows.

  • Comfort working in Figma and sharing work across design and production teams.

  • A strong understanding of typography, composition, timing, rhythm, and visual storytelling.

  • Experience making complex or unfamiliar subjects understandable through design and motion.

  • Experience working with subject matter experts and incorporating technical feedback without losing clarity or creative quality.

  • Curiosity about AI and research, and a willingness to learn enough about a subject to represent it thoughtfully.

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.

To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.

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

OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy

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.

Source: OpenAI on Ashby · View original posting (opens in new tab)

Pay in context

This role's base floor ($223,000) is above 86% of the 741 Marketing roles in California listed on this site. Their median floor is $160,000; the middle half runs from $135,000 to $195,670.

Only jobs on this site count, and each one publishes a base salary of $100,000 or more, so this compares six-figure jobs with each other, not with the whole market. Computed Nov 6, 2026.

This range next to 6 other live OpenAI roles with the nearest advertised base floor
Chart as a table
This range next to 6 other live OpenAI roles with the nearest advertised base floor
RolePublished base
Motion Designer (this listing)$223K - $247K
Machine Learning Engineer, API Multicloud$223K - $423K
Editor, Research Team$223K - $247K
Physical Design Engineer$225K - $485K
Product Marketing Manager, Advertising$225K - $250K
Mechanical Engineer, Dynamometer and Actuator Testing Infrastructure$225K - $318K
Signal Integrity Engineer$225K - $445K

Same $100K to $400K scale as every card. All OpenAI roles · How to read the bar

Observed changes

  1. First observed on the employer's board
  2. Began meeting the published-salary criteria
Observed since
Employer-stated posting date
2026-10-28
Where this pay comes from

Location as the employer wrote it: San Francisco

USD 223,000 – 247,000 · 1 YEAR · Salary · San Francisco

Method
Structured pay field published by the employer
Checked
Rule set
us-base-v2

The employer's job board publishes this pay as a dedicated data field. We read the field directly; no interpretation was needed.

What we verified

  • The pay figures come from the employer's own listing, quoted exactly above.
  • The pay is an annual base salary in US dollars with a minimum of at least $100,000.
  • The role was publicly listed on the employer's job board when last checked.

We do not verify what the employer will actually offer, whether the employer is still recruiting for the role, or anything beyond what the employer published. Full methodology.