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The AI Architect team at OpenAI partners with organizations to deploy the company's most capable AI models into real-world impact. This role focuses on the Retail and Consumer sector.
As an Applied AI Architect, you will be the senior technical owner for a named portfolio of retail customers, serving as the primary technical counterpart to their leadership teams. You will act as the "CTO of your book of business," shaping each customer's AI strategy and guiding their journey from pre-sales discovery through deployment, adoption, and measurable business impact.
You will own the technical account plan across ChatGPT Enterprise, the OpenAI API, and other agentic AI solutions. In partnership with Account Directors, you will translate business priorities into a focused use-case portfolio, an actionable adoption roadmap, and a clear path to durable customer value and growth. You own the technical strategy, customer journey, and path to production value.
Key responsibilities include:
- Serve as the primary technical advisor and long-term relationship owner for a named portfolio of existing customers and pre-sales prospects
- Partner with Account Directors on account strategy while owning the technical account plan, milestones, adoption priorities, and expansion opportunities
- Lead discovery with executives and technical teams to identify, qualify, and prioritize use cases tied to meaningful business outcomes
- Develop clear Applied AI Architectures spanning models, applications, data, integration, security, privacy, governance, evaluation, and deployment
- Guide customers through technical evaluations, demonstrations, workshops, prototypes, and proofs of value
- Maintain a focused use-case portfolio with clear decision criteria, ownership, blockers, success measures, and adoption plans
- Develop trusted relationships and technical champions across CTOs, CIOs, CISOs, AI leaders, and engineering teams
- Qualify and coordinate support from Deployment Engineering, implementation, training, product specialists, and partners
- Remain accountable for technical progress and customer outcomes while ensuring delivery teams own execution
- Track adoption, usage, account health, production readiness, and measurable customer impact
- Apply Retail expertise to recognize repeatable patterns and identify expansion opportunities
- Share customer insights with Product, Engineering, and Research teams
You will remain accountable for technical outcomes while bringing in specialists across deployment, implementation, enablement, security, product, and partners to provide deeper expertise and execute work where needed. This role requires strong industry fluency, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to move confidently between executive strategy and hands-on technical conversations.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Significant experience in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions architecture, solutions engineering, technical account leadership, AI deployment, or technical customer success
- Demonstrated success guiding enterprise organizations from technical evaluation through production adoption and measurable business impact
- Ability to build credibility with senior technical and business leaders while communicating effectively with hands-on engineers
- Strong software and cloud architecture foundations, including APIs, distributed systems, data integration, identity, security, and privacy
- Understanding of modern AI systems, frontier LLM models, agentic applications, model evaluation, retrieval, or enterprise AI workflows
- Ability to prototype, explain technical tradeoffs, and work confidently with APIs, SDKs, and languages such as Python or JavaScript
- Sound judgment about when to go deep personally versus when to involve specialists, with ability to define clear handoffs and ownership
- Experience developing technical account plans, prioritizing complex customer portfolios, and connecting adoption to measurable outcomes
- Meaningful Retail expertise or strong fluency with the needs of retail and consumer businesses
- Clear communication skills and ability to turn ambiguity into practical technical narratives, executive decisions, or action plans
- Collaborative approach across disciplines with commitment to helping organizations deploy advanced AI responsibly
