Manager, Applied AI Architects
Remote • Munich, Germany • FullTime
Posted 13d ago
About the job
As the Manager of Applied AI Architects, you will lead a team of senior technical leaders responsible for the technical strategy, customer journey, and path to production value for OpenAI's largest and most complex customers. Your team will act as the “CTO of the book of business,” partnering with customer executives and technical teams from pre-sales discovery and solution evaluation through deployment, adoption, and measurable business impact. You will set the operating model for how Applied AI Architects own technical account plans across various OpenAI solutions, prioritizing customer portfolios, allocating technical resources, and ensuring business priorities translate into focused use cases, credible architectures, actionable adoption roadmaps, and durable customer value and growth. You will remain accountable for the team's technical outcomes while developing its people and bringing in the right specialists across deployment, implementation, enablement, security, product, research, and partners. This role requires serving as an executive technical sponsor for critical engagements, a senior voice of the customer inside OpenAI, and a cross-functional leader who can move confidently between regional strategy, executive decision-making, architectural depth, and hands-on coaching.
Responsibilities
- Hire, coach, and develop a high-performing team of Applied AI Architects, fostering technical excellence and customer stewardship.
- Define and refine the strategy and operating model for Applied AI Architecture across Europe, aligning company priorities with customer needs and go-to-market strategies.
- Partner with Sales leadership to prioritize accounts, allocate technical resources, and establish technical strategies for key engagements.
- Ensure Applied AI Architects serve as primary technical advisors, owning technical account plans, adoption priorities, and account health.
- Lead complex customer journeys from executive vision to production adoption and measurable business impact.
- Coach the team on Applied AI architectures covering models, applications, data, integration, security, and deployment.
- Build trusted relationships with C-suite and senior technical leaders, serving as an executive technical sponsor.
- Mobilize internal specialists and external partners to remove blockers and deliver a cohesive customer experience.
- Establish rigorous tracking of portfolio health, including technical wins, production readiness, and customer impact.
- Translate field patterns into actionable feedback for Product, Engineering, and Research teams, developing reusable architecture guidance.
- Foster a culture balancing customer outcomes with responsible AI deployment and effective specialist handoffs.
Requirements
- Deep technical acumen in modern AI systems, frontier models, agentic applications, platform technologies, software and cloud architecture, APIs, data integration, identity, security, privacy, evaluation, and enterprise deployment.
- 10+ years of experience in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions architecture, solutions engineering, technical account leadership, AI deployment, or technical consulting, including work with large enterprises.
- 4+ years of people-management experience hiring, coaching, and developing high-performing customer-facing technical teams.
- Experience guiding enterprise organizations from technical discovery through production adoption and measurable business impact.
- Outstanding executive communication and presentation skills, with the ability to build credibility with C-suite and technical leaders.
- Ability to lead a complex portfolio, make thoughtful resource-allocation decisions, and balance regional strategy with hands-on support.
- Strong architectural judgment, knowing when to go deep, coach, or involve specialists.
- Ability to build strong partnerships across Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, Deployment, and external partner ecosystems.
- Comfort leading across diverse functions and stakeholder groups.
Benefits
- Relocation assistance to new employees.