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 organi