Manager, Applied AI Architect
AI in this role
Lead a team of Applied AI Architects to drive customer success, pre-sales discovery, and deployment of generative AI and machine learning solutions.
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.
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. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through this form. No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance.
We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this link.
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At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.
How we rate this
Manager, Applied AI Architect at OpenAI rates 75 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.
Prepare for this job
A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a research question you investigated. What did you find?
- Tell me about a project where applied ai was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where team management was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where technical leadership was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where pre sales was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: AI Research, Applied AI, Team Management, Technical Leadership, and Pre Sales. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project — this role expects it to be a running habit.
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