Applied AI Architect, Retail at OpenAI in San Francisco

Job description

• Application
• About the Team
• As an AI Architect, you will be the senior technical owner for a named portfolio of Retail 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.
• You will own the technical account plan across ChatGPT Enterprise, the OpenAI API, Codex, and other agentic AI solutions. In partnership with the Account Director, 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. The Account Director owns commercial strategy; you own the technical strategy, customer journey, and path to production value.
• You will remain accountable for the technical outcome while bringing in the right specialists across deployment, implementation, enablement, security, product, and partners to provide deeper expertise and execute work where needed. This role calls for strong industry fluency, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to move confidently between executive strategy and hands-on technical conversations.

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

• Have significant experience in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions architecture, solutions engineering, technical account leadership, AI deployment, or technical customer success.
• Have 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.
• Bring strong software and cloud architecture foundations, including APIs, distributed systems, data integration, identity, security, and privacy.
• Understand modern AI systems, frontier LLM models, agentic applications, model evaluation, retrieval, or enterprise AI workflows.
• Can prototype, explain technical tradeoffs, and work confidently with APIs, SDKs, and languages such as Python or JavaScript.
• Exercise sound judgment about when to go deep personally, when to involve specialists, and how to define clear handoffs and ownership.
• Have experience developing technical account plans, prioritizing complex customer portfolios, and connecting adoption to measurable outcomes.
• Bring meaningful Retail expertise or strong fluency with the needs of retail and consumer businesses.
• Communicate clearly and can turn ambiguity into a practical technical narrative, executive decision, or action plan.
• Work collaboratively across disciplines and care deeply about helping organizations deploy advanced AI responsibly.

Skills

Required

• Customer-facing technical roles
• Solutions architecture
• Solutions engineering
• Technical account leadership
• AI deployment
• Technical customer success
• Enterprise technical evaluation
• Production adoption
• Software and cloud architecture
• APIs
• Distributed systems
• Data integration

Benefits

• 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.
• Zone A
• $217K – $276K • Offers Equity