About this role
Professionals who thrive in this role possess deep retail industry knowledge, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to bridge executive strategy with hands-on technical conversations. The AI Architect team at OpenAI partners with organizations to turn capable models into meaningful, real-world impact by designing secure, scalable solutions that move from exploration into sustained production.
As the senior technical owner for a named portfolio of retail customers, the incumbent acts as the virtual CTO for their book of business. Responsibilities include shaping AI strategy, guiding technical evaluations, and collaborating closely with internal teams like Sales, Product, and Engineering while coordinating deployment specialists.
What you will do
- Act as the primary technical advisor and long-term technical relationship owner for a named portfolio of retail customers and pre-sales prospects.
- Partner with Account Directors to develop technical account plans, technical milestones, adoption priorities, and expansion opportunities.
- Lead discovery sessions with executive and technical teams to identify and prioritize use cases tied to business outcomes.
- Develop 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 to ensure production confidence.
- Track adoption, usage, account health, and measurable customer impact while intervening early against risks.
- Translate field learnings and customer insights into product improvements, architecture guidance, and reusable practices.
What you need
- Significant experience in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions architecture, solutions engineering, technical account leadership, or AI deployment.
- Demonstrated track record of guiding enterprise organizations from technical evaluation through production adoption and measurable impact.
- Strong software and cloud architecture foundations covering APIs, distributed systems, data integration, identity, security, and privacy.
- Solid understanding of modern AI systems, frontier LLM models, agentic applications, model evaluation, and retrieval workflows.
- Ability to prototype, explain technical tradeoffs, and work confidently with APIs, SDKs, and languages like Python or JavaScript.
- Meaningful retail expertise or strong fluency regarding the operational and business needs of retail and consumer enterprises.
Benefits
- Offers Equity
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the salary range for this position?
The salary range for this role is $217K – $276K and includes offered equity.
Where is this job located?
This position is located in San Francisco.
What team will I be working on?
You will be part of the AI Architect team, which partners with organizations to turn OpenAI's most capable models into meaningful, real-world impact.