OpenAI

Applied AI Architect, Retail

OpenAI$150K — $180K *
Retail & Consumer Goods
8 - 10 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • 10+ years in a technical pre-sales or similar role
  • 3+ years of experience selling to Retail customers
  • Strong understanding of IT security principles for B2B SaaS products
  • Foundational knowledge in programming languages like Python or JavaScript
  • Experience with Generative AI and traditional ML solutions
  • Exceptional presentation and communication skills
  • Proactive problem-solver with a collaborative attitude

Responsibilities

  • Deliver an exceptional pre-sales customer experience for Retail clients
  • Demonstrate the value of OpenAI's products to meet business needs
  • Create and maintain relevant documentation, guides, and FAQs
  • Develop strong customer relationships throughout the sales process
  • Foster customer advocacy and communicate feedback to internal teams
  • Address security and compliance inquiries for customers
  • Support customers in navigating resources and requirements

Benefits

  • Hybrid work model with three days in the office
  • Relocation assistance for new employees
  • Focus on customer advocacy and feedback integration
  • Strong emphasis on team collaboration and support
  • Commitment to a diverse and inclusive workplace
Full Job Description
About the Role

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.

In this role, you will:
  • 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.


You might thrive in this role if you:
  • 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.

About OpenAI

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit corporation OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company was founded in 2015 by a group of technology leaders, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and John Schulman. OpenAI's mission is to develop and promote friendly AI for the betterment of humanity. The company has developed a number of cutting-edge AI technologies, including GPT-3, a language processing system that can generate human-like text. OpenAI has received funding from a number of high-profile investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Peter Thiel.
Learn more about OpenAI
Size
100 employees
Industry
Founded
2015

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