Applied AI Architect, Digital Natives (Strategics)

Location

San Francisco, California, United States

Employment Type

Full-time

Work Location Type

Hybrid

Compensation

• Salary Range: $218K – $278K
• Equity: Included
• Commission: Included

The base pay offered may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. If the role is non-exempt, overtime pay will be provided consistent with applicable laws. In addition to the salary range listed above, total compensation also includes generous equity, performance-related bonus(es) for eligible employees, and the following benefits:

• Medical, dental, and vision insurance for you and your family, with employer contributions to Health Savings Accounts
• Pre-tax accounts for Health FSA, Dependent Care FSA, and commuter expenses (parking and transit)
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• Paid parental leave (up to 24 weeks for birth parents and 20 weeks for non-birthing parents), plus paid medical and caregiver leave (up to 8 weeks)
• Paid time off: flexible PTO for exempt employees and up to 15 days annually for non-exempt employees
• 13+ paid company holidays, and multiple paid coordinated company office closures throughout the year for focus and recharge, plus paid sick or safe time (1 hour per 30 hours worked, or more, as required by applicable state or local law)
• Mental health and wellness support
• Employer-paid basic life and disability coverage
• Annual learning and development stipend to fuel your professional growth
• Daily meals in our offices, and meal delivery credits as eligible
• Relocation support for eligible employees
• Additional taxable fringe benefits, such as charitable donation matching and wellness stipends, may also be provided.

More details about our benefits are available to candidates during the hiring process.

This role is at-will and OpenAI reserves the right to modify base pay and other compensation components at any time based on individual performance, team or company results, or market conditions.

About the Position

The AI Architect team partners with organizations to turn OpenAI's most capable models into meaningful, real-world impact. We work with customers across industries and digital-native businesses to identify where AI can create value, design secure and scalable solutions, and help those solutions move from early exploration into sustained production adoption. The team brings together technical strategy, customer partnership, and practical deployment expertise, working closely with Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, and specialist delivery teams.

Responsibilities

As an AI Architect, you will be the senior technical owner for a named portfolio of customers and 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 and solution evaluation through deployment, adoption, and measurable business impact.

• Serve as the primary technical advisor and long-term technical 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, technical 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, securing confidence in both the solution and its path to production.
• Maintain a focused use-case portfolio with clear decision criteria, ownership, blockers, success measures, delivery needs, and adoption plans.
• Develop trusted relationships and technical champions across CTOs, CIOs, CISOs, AI leaders, engineering teams, and other customer stakeholders.
• Qualify and coordinate support from Deployment Engineering, implementation, training and enablement, product and domain specialists, partners, and other delivery teams.
• Remain accountable for technical progress and customer outcomes while ensuring delivery teams own implementation execution once engaged.
• Track adoption, usage, account health, production readiness, and measurable customer impact, intervening early when risks threaten value realization.
• Apply industry or digital-native expertise to recognize repeatable patterns, sharpen customer priorities, and identify relevant expansion opportunities.
• Share customer insights with Product, Engineering, and Research, translating field learnings into better products, architecture guidance, and reusable practices.

Requirements

• Significant experience in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions architecture, solutions engineering, technical account leadership, AI deployment, or technical customer success.
• Guided enterprise organizations from technical evaluation through production adoption and measurable business impact.
• Build credibility with senior technical and business leaders while communicating equally well 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, when to involve specialists, and how to define clear handoffs and ownership.
• Experience developing technical account plans, prioritizing complex customer portfolios, and connecting adoption to measurable outcomes.
• Meaningful expertise in a relevant industry or strong fluency with the needs of digital-native businesses.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to turn ambiguity into a practical technical narrative, executive decision, or action plan.
• Collaborative mindset and a deep care for helping organizations deploy advanced AI responsibly.

About the Company

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.

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