Manager, Applied AI Architect

About the role

We’re looking for a Manager, Applied AI Architect to lead a team of Applied AI Architects. In this role, you’ll combine technical leadership, customer engagement, and team development to deliver exceptional customer experiences from pre-sales discovery and solution evaluation through deployment and adoption, driving real business impact.

You’ll guide your team through complex customer challenges, help them navigate ambiguity, and ensure solutions are grounded in both strong technical thinking and clear business value. You’ll also partner closely with Sales, Deployment, Product, Engineering, and Research to create a seamless end-to-end customer journey.

This role is open in our San Francisco or New York office. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will

• Develop and communicate a clear strategic vision for the Applied AI Architect team, ensuring alignment with the company's overarching goals and the evolving needs of our customers.

• Guide and support a multifaceted team throughout the customer lifecycle, from pre-sales discovery and evaluation through deployment and adoption, ensuring clear technical account plans, measurable customer outcomes, and scalable systems and processes.

• Act as a trusted escalation point for key customers within your sales segment, helping to address complex technical challenges and ensuring clear communication with executive-level stakeholders.

• Advocate for the innovative and effective application of our AI technologies across various sectors, positioning the company as a leader in the industry.

• Ensure your team remains accountable for technical progress and customer outcomes, coordinating specialist support and establishing clear ownership with delivery teams for implementation execution.

You’ll thrive in this role if you

• Bring 8+ years of experience in technical customer-facing roles, building and managing C-level technical and business relationships within complex, global organizations.

• Have 3+ years of experience leading technical pre-sales teams, with a proven track record of hiring, mentoring, and managing high-performing teams.

• Have successfully led complex sales involving Generative AI or traditional ML solutions, with a solid understanding of network and cloud architectures.

• Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help others, and a willingness to learn whatever it takes to support the team and help customers thrive

• Approach work with humility, a collaborative mindset, and a willingness to learn whatever it takes to support the team and help customers thrive.

About OpenAI

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 https://cdn.openai.com/policies/eeo-policy-statement.pdf.

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