Applied AI Architect, Education

As an Applied AI Architect for Education at OpenAI, 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 remain accountable for the technical outcome while bringing in the right specialists across deployment, implementation, enablement, security, product, education programs, and partners.

Responsibilities:

• 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.
• 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.

Requirements:

• Significant experience in customer-facing technical roles such as solutions architecture, solutions engineering, technical account leadership, AI deployment, or technical customer success.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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