Applied AI Architect - EDU

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 Education, we partner with universities, schools, research institutions, and countrywide education systems to advance responsible, mission-aligned uses of AI. These environments require more than technical deployment: success depends on institutional trust, thoughtful governance, stakeholder education, change management, and a value narrative that resonates with academic leaders, researchers, IT teams, faculty, administrators, and students. ABOUT THE ROLE As an Applied AI Architect for Education, you will be the senior technical owner for a named portfolio of education customers and the primary technical counterpart to their leadership teams. You will act as the “CTO of your book of business,” shaping each institution’s AI strategy and guiding its journey from pre-sales discovery and solution evaluation through deployment, adoption, and measurable institutional impact. You will own the technical account plan across ChatGPT Edu, the OpenAI API, Codex, and other agentic AI solutions. In partnership with the Account Director, you will translate institutional priorities into a focused portfolio of use cases, an actionable adoption roadmap, and a clear path to durable value and growth. The Account Director owns the commercial strategy; you own the technical strategy, customer journey, and path to production value. You will work across academic, research, administrative, and operational contexts—helping customers determine where AI can responsibly improve teaching and learning, accelerate research, strengthen student and faculty services, and make institutional operations more effective. You will account for the realities of education environments, including shared governance, complex stakeholder networks, academic calendars, accessibility, data privacy, responsible-AI expectations, and the need to build confidence among communities with differing levels of AI readiness. You will remain accountable for the technical outcome while bringing in the right specialists across deployment, implementation, enablement, security, product, education programs, and partners. This role calls for strong education-sector fluency, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to move confidently between executive strategy, academic and operational workflows, and hands-on technical conversations. IN THIS ROLE, YOU WILL: - Serve as the primary technical advisor and long-term technical relationship owner for a named portfolio of existing education customers and pre-sales prospects. - Partner with Account Directors on account strategy while owning the technical account plan, technical milestones, adoption priorities, value-realization path, and expansion opportunities. - Lead discovery with institutional executives, academic leaders, researchers, faculty, administrators, and technical teams to identify and prioritize use cases connected to meaningful institutional objectives. - Translate education priorities into clear Applied AI Architectures spanning models, applications, institutional data, identity, integrations, security, privacy, governance, evaluation, and deployment. - Guide institutions through technical evaluations, demonstrations, workshops, prototypes, and proofs of value, building confidence in both the solution and its responsible path to production. - Translate institutional objectives into actionable adoption roadmaps with clear workstreams, sequencing, milestones, stakeholder ownership, governance, risks, success measures, and change-management needs. - Develop a focused use-case portfolio across areas such as teaching and learning, research, student and faculty services, knowledge management, software development, and administrative operations. - Translate institutional objectives into actionable adoption roadmaps with clear workstreams, sequencing, milestones, stakeholder ownership, governance, risks, success measures, and change-management needs. - Build trusted relationships and technical champions across CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, provosts, deans, research leaders, faculty, administrators, and other institutional stakeholders. - Qualify and coordinate support from Deployment Engineering, implementation, training and enablement, Product, Research, education 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. - Identify repeatable education patterns and reusable architectures that can accelerate responsible adoption across institutions, departments, campuses, and education systems. - Translate field insights into actionable feedback for Product, Engineering, and Research, representing the needs and production patterns of education customers. - Help identify expansion opportunities where OpenAI can support additional academic, research, administrative, or operational workflows. YOU MIGHT THRIVE IN THIS ROLE IF YOU: - 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 complex organizations from technical evaluation through production adoption and measurable value realization. - 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. - Can translate technical capabilities into institutional value across priorities such as student success, research productivity, faculty enablement, administrative effectiveness, accessibility, risk, and governance. - Communicate clearly and can turn ambiguity, competing stakeholder needs, and complex technical choices into a practical narrative, executive decision, or action plan. - Work collaboratively across disciplines and care deeply about helping education institutions deploy advanced AI safely, responsibly, and in service of their missions. - Meaningful experience with education technology, higher education, K–12 systems, research institutions, or similarly mission-driven and consensus-oriented environments is an added bonus 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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