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The Applied AI Architect team at OpenAI partners with organizations to deploy the company's most capable models into real-world impact. As Manager of Applied AI Architects in Tokyo, you will lead a team of senior technical leaders responsible for technical strategy, customer journey, and production adoption for OpenAI's largest and most complex customers across Japan.
Your team will serve as the "CTO of the book of business," partnering with customer executives and technical teams from pre-sales discovery through deployment, adoption, and measurable business impact. You will set the operating model for how Applied AI Architects own technical account plans across ChatGPT Enterprise, the OpenAI API, and agentic AI solutions. Working closely with Sales leadership and Account Directors, you will prioritize customer portfolios, allocate technical resources, and ensure business priorities translate into focused use cases, credible architectures, and actionable adoption roadmaps.
You will remain accountable for the team's technical outcomes while developing its people and bringing in specialists across deployment, implementation, enablement, security, product, research, and partners. You will serve as an executive technical sponsor for critical engagements, a senior voice of the customer inside OpenAI, and a cross-functional leader who moves confidently between Japan strategy, executive decision-making, architectural depth, and hands-on coaching.
Key responsibilities include hiring and coaching a high-performing team of Applied AI Architects; defining and refining strategy and operating model for the region; partnering with Sales to prioritize accounts and allocate resources; ensuring architects serve as primary technical advisors for their portfolios; leading complex, multi-threaded customer journeys; coaching the team on AI architectures spanning models, applications, data, integration, identity, security, and deployment; building trusted relationships with C-suite and board-level stakeholders; mobilizing specialists to remove blockers; establishing rigorous portfolio health metrics; translating field patterns into actionable feedback for internal teams; and fostering a culture balancing ambitious customer outcomes with responsible AI deployment.
You bring 10+ years in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions architecture, solutions engineering, technical account leadership, AI deployment, or technical consulting with large enterprises. You have 4+ years of people-management experience hiring and developing high-performing customer-facing technical teams. You possess deep technical acumen in modern AI systems, frontier models, agentic applications, platform technologies, software and cloud architecture, APIs, data integration, identity, security, privacy, evaluation, and enterprise deployment. You demonstrate outstanding executive communication skills, can lead a complex portfolio with thoughtful resource allocation, exercise strong architectural judgment, build partnerships across functions, and are comfortable leading across Japan from Tokyo while adapting to different industries, cultures, regulatory contexts, and customer operating models.
