There is an Applied AI Architect, Retail vacancy at OpenAI, and the role is based in California. Expect a hybrid setup: this is full-time work with regular office days. OpenAI lists pay of $217,000 to $276,000 a year.
Here is the role as OpenAI describes it.
The AI Architect team partners with organizations to turn OpenAI's most capable models into meaningful, real-world impact. We work with retail and consumer 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.
As an AI Architect, you will be the senior technical owner for a named portfolio of Retail customers and the primary technical counterpart to their leadership teams. You will act as the โCTO of your book of businessโ, shaping each customer's AI strategy and guiding their journey from pre-sales discovery and solution evaluation through deployment, adoption, and measurable business impact.
You will own the technical account plan across ChatGPT Enterprise, the OpenAI API, Codex, and other agentic AI solutions. In partnership with the Account Director, you will translate business priorities into a focused use-case portfolio, an actionable adoption roadmap, and a clear path to durable customer value and growth. The Account Director owns commercial strategy; you own the technical strategy, customer journey, and path to production value.
You will remain accountable for the technical outcome while bringing in the right specialists across deployment, implementation, enablement, security, product, and partners to provide deeper expertise and execute work where needed. This role calls for strong industry fluency, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to move confidently between executive strategy and hands-on technical conversations.
Serve as the primary technical advisor and long-term technical relationship owner for a named portfolio of existing customers and pre-sales prospects.
Partner with Account Directors on account strategy while owning the technical account plan, technical milestones, adoption priorities, and expansion opportunities.
Lead discovery with executives and technical teams to identify, qualify, and prioritize use cases tied to meaningful business outcomes.
Develop clear 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, securing confidence in both the solution and its path to production.
Maintain a focused use-case portfolio with clear decision criteria, ownership, blockers, success measures, delivery needs, and adoption plans.
Develop trusted relationships and technical champions across CTOs, CIOs, CISOs, AI leaders, engineering teams, and other customer stakeholders.
Qualify and coordinate support from Deployment Engineering, implementation, training and enablement, product and domain specialists, partners, and other delivery teams.
Remain accountable for technical progress and customer outcomes while ensuring delivery teams own implementation execution once engaged.
Track adoption, usage, account health, production readiness, and measurable customer impact, intervening early when risks threaten value realization.
Apply Retail expertise to recognize repeatable patterns, sharpen customer priorities, and identify relevant expansion opportunities.
Share customer insights with Product, Engineering, and Research, translating field learnings into better products, architecture guidance, and reusable practices.
Have significant experience in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions architecture, solutions engineering, technical account leadership, AI deployment, or technical customer success.
Have guided enterprise organizations from technical evaluation through production adoption and measurable business impact.
Build credibility with senior technical and business leaders while communicating equally well with hands-on engineers.
Bring strong software and cloud architecture foundations, including APIs, distributed systems, data integration, identity, security, and privacy.
Understand modern AI systems, frontier LLM models, agentic applications, model evaluation, retrieval, or enterprise AI workflows.
Can prototype, explain technical tradeoffs, and work confidently with APIs, SDKs, and languages such as Python or JavaScript.
Exercise sound judgment about when to go deep personally, when to involve specialists, and how to define clear handoffs and ownership.
Have experience developing technical account plans, prioritizing complex customer portfolios, and connecting adoption to measurable outcomes.
Bring meaningful Retail expertise or strong fluency with the needs of retail and consumer businesses.
Communicate clearly and can turn ambiguity into a practical technical narrative, executive decision, or action plan.
Work collaboratively across disciplines and care deeply about helping organizations deploy advanced AI responsibly.
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 OpenAIโs 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.
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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.
OpenAI advertises $217,000 to $276,000 a year for this role.
It is hybrid. You would work partly from home and partly from the office in California.
The posting mentions skills such as Python, JavaScript and Customer Success. Read the full description above for the complete list.
Use the apply button on this page. It takes you to OpenAI's own application form, so your CV goes directly to their hiring team.
OpenAI published the role on September 17, 2026. We check the employer's job board every day and take this page down when the role closes, so if you can read it, the job was still listed at our last check.
Source: OpenAI careers page (jobs.ashbyhq.com). Applications go straight to the employer. We check the listing daily and remove it once it closes.
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Industry: Technology
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