Applied AI Architect, Retail

Location

San Francisco, United States

Employment Type

Full-time

Compensation

• Salary Range: $217K – $276K
• Benefits: Equity, Commission, Medical, Dental, Vision, 401(k) with match, Paid Parental Leave, PTO, Holidays, Mental Health Support, Life and Disability Coverage, Learning Stipend, Meals, Relocation Support, and more.

About the Position

OpenAI is seeking an Applied AI Architect, Retail to join our team in San Francisco. This role is a hybrid position that combines on-site and remote work.

Responsibilities

• 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 Retail 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 Retail expertise or strong fluency with the needs of retail and consumer businesses.
• Clear communication skills and ability to turn ambiguity into a practical technical narrative, executive decision, or action plan.
• Collaborative mindset and deep care about helping organizations deploy advanced AI responsibly.

About the Team

The AI Architect team partners with organizations to turn OpenAI's most capable models into meaningful, real-world impact. We work with retail and consumer 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.

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. We are an equal opportunity employer and 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.

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