Applied AI Architect, Partner

ABOUT THE TEAM The AI Architect team partners with organizations to turn OpenAI's most capable models into meaningful, real-world impact. We work with customers across industries and digital-native businesses to identify where AI can create value, design secure and scalable solutions, and help those solutions move from early exploration into sustained production adoption. The team brings together technical strategy, customer partnership, and practical deployment expertise, working closely with Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, and specialist delivery teams. Within the team, Partner Applied AI Architects work with strategic partners—including global and regional system integrators, consulting and advisory firms, and technology partners—to extend OpenAI’s technical reach and help partners deliver high-quality AI solutions for our joint customers. We bring together technical strategy, partner enablement, architecture expertise, and practical deployment experience, working closely with Partnerships, Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, Security, and specialist delivery teams. ABOUT THE ROLE As a Partner Applied AI Architect, you will be a senior technical advisor to a portfolio of strategic partners and the primary technical counterpart to their leadership and delivery organizations. You will shape how partners build practices around OpenAI, develop solutions using our products, and take joint customers from AI opportunity and technical evaluation through production adoption and measurable business impact. You will own the technical strategy and architecture across partner engagements involving ChatGPT Enterprise, the OpenAI API, Codex, and other agentic AI solutions. In close partnership with the Revenue Partnerships team, you will translate joint business priorities into technical strategies, solution patterns, enablement plans, and a focused portfolio of high-value customer opportunities. You will work directly with partners on strategic customer engagements—leading discovery, shaping architectures, navigating complex technical decisions, and helping secure technical wins—while building the partner capabilities required to deliver successfully and independently at scale. You will remain accountable for the technical quality and outcomes of the partnership while bringing in the right specialists across deployment, implementation, security, product, enablement, and other teams when deeper expertise is needed. The role calls for strong architectural judgment, executive presence, partner leadership, and the ability to move confidently between business 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 portfolio of strategic partners, building trusted relationships with their executives, AI leaders, architects, engineering teams, and delivery organizations. - Partner closely with the Revenue Partnerships team as one virtual team, aligning partner strategy, technical priorities, joint customer opportunities, and measures of success. - Develop the technical strategy and plan for each partner, identifying priority solutions, use cases, technical capabilities, enablement needs, delivery risks, and opportunities to drive customer adoption. - Assess prospective and existing partners’ technical capabilities and delivery readiness, identifying strengths, gaps, and the investments required to successfully deliver OpenAI-powered solutions. - Lead technical discovery with partners and joint customers to identify, qualify, and prioritize AI use cases tied to meaningful business outcomes. - Develop clear Applied AI architectures spanning models, applications, enterprise data, integrations, identity, security, privacy, governance, evaluation, reliability, and deployment. - Collaborate with partner sales and technical teams on strategic opportunities, providing technical guidance through discovery, demonstrations, workshops, prototypes, architectural recommendations, and proofs of value. - Guide partners through their initial and most strategic OpenAI deployments, helping them navigate technical tradeoffs and production dependencies while ensuring solutions meet a high bar for quality, security, reliability, and responsible deployment. - Build partner capability and technical self-sufficiency through tailored enablement, architectural guidance, reusable solution patterns, technical workshops, and mentorship. - Establish clear standards and mechanisms for partner-delivered solution quality, identifying risks early and intervening when architecture, implementation, security, evaluation, or adoption issues threaten customer outcomes. - Orchestrate the right OpenAI specialists across Deployment Engineering, Product, Security, implementation, enablement, and domain teams while maintaining clear ownership and handoffs between OpenAI and partner delivery teams. - Track partner capability, joint pipeline technical progress, production adoption, usage, solution quality, and measurable customer impact to identify where additional investment or intervention is needed. - Identify repeatable patterns across partner engagements and turn them into architectures, playbooks, reference solutions, and best practices that allow successful approaches to scale across partners and customers. - Bring insights from partners and joint customers back to Product, Engineering, Research, and Partnerships, helping shape product strategy, technical guidance, and the broader OpenAI partner ecosystem. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - Have significant experience in senior customer- or partner-facing technical roles such as solutions architecture, partner engineering, field architecture, technical account leadership, AI deployment, or technical consulting. - Have worked successfully with global or regional system integrators, consulting firms, or other technology partners, and understand how partner organizations sell, architect, and deliver complex enterprise technology. - Have guided complex enterprise organizations from technical discovery and evaluation through production deployment, adoption, and measurable business impact. - Can build credibility with CTOs, CIOs, CISOs, partner executives, and AI leaders while communicating equally effectively with architects and hands-on engineers. - Bring strong software and cloud architecture foundations, including APIs, distributed systems, enterprise data, integrations, identity, security, privacy, and governance. - Understand modern AI systems, frontier LLMs, agentic applications, model evaluation, retrieval, and enterprise AI workflows. - Can prototype when useful, explain technical tradeoffs clearly, and work confidently with APIs, SDKs, and languages such as Python or JavaScript. - Have experience enabling technical organizations at scale, turning your own expertise into repeatable architectures, training, patterns, and practices that others can successfully apply. - Understand enterprise security and compliance requirements and can guide partners and customers through the technical considerations required to move AI systems safely into production. - Are comfortable balancing the needs of OpenAI, the partner, and the end customer, and can exercise sound judgment when those priorities do not perfectly align. - Know when to go deep personally, when to coach a partner toward the answer, and when to engage specialist resources. - Can prioritize across a portfolio of partners and customer opportunities, focusing technical resources on the work most likely to create durable customer value and adoption. - Communicate clearly and can turn ambiguity into a practical architecture, executive decision, enablement plan, or path to production. - Own problems end-to-end, learn quickly, and care deeply about helping partners and customers deploy advanced AI responsibly. 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 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. 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