Senior Applied AI Architect for Retail

Socket.dev; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenAI is seeking an AI Architect to serve as senior technical owner for a named portfolio of Retail customers, guiding their journey from pre-sales through deployment and measurable business impact. You will own the technical account plan for our AI solutions, translate business priorities into use cases and an adoption roadmap, and lead cross-functional teams to production value.

The role requires fluency in retail tech, strong architecture judgment, and ability to move between executive

Qualifications

• 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.

Responsibilities

• 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.

Job description

OpenAI is seeking an AI Architect to serve as senior technical owner for a named portfolio of Retail customers, guiding their journey from pre-sales through deployment and measurable business impact. You will own the technical account plan for our AI solutions, translate business priorities into use cases and an adoption roadmap, and lead cross-functional teams to production value.

The role requires fluency in retail tech, strong architecture judgment, and ability to move between executive