Applied AI Architect - EDU

About the Team OpenAI’s AI Success Engineer team partners with the world’s most ambitious organizations to translate cutting edge AI into real business value. We guide customers from first deployment through scaled enterprise adoption. Our work spans technical integration and enablement, workflow transformation, and sustained program and product delivery. Our customers range from fast growing digital natives to the largest global enterprises, government agencies and educational institutions. Every engagement is an opportunity to shape how AI changes work, productivity, and innovation. This role sits at the center of that mission. About the Role The Success Engineer role is the primary post-sales point of contact for a portfolio of education institutions. You are responsible for driving account health and adoption, ensuring technical readiness, identifying high-impact academic and administrative use cases, and delivering measurable value to our education customers using OpenAI’s platform. This role blends technical leadership, program management, customer advisory, and product influence. You will partner deeply with customer teams, map workflows, lead configuration and enablement, oversee deployment plans, and guide institutions toward high impact use cases that showcase the full value of our platform. You will work closely with Sales, Solutions Architecture, Product, and Research to ensure the customer experience is connected and successful across every touchpoint. Success in this role means accelerating adoption, increasing customer activation depth, guiding strategic use cases that get to production, and helping customers demonstrate tangible business impact. This role is based in SF or NYC; we offer relocation benefits to new hires. In this role, you will: Lead the technical relationship for post-sale customers and act as their trusted advisor on deployment, adoption, and value realization Own account health, adoption velocity, and ongoing technical deployment and success across your portfolio Conduct technical enablement and configuration sessions across our broad product portfolio Identify and validate use cases by embedding with customer teams to understand workflows and pain points Lead account level coordination across multiple workstreams, including new product activation, change management, and customer rollout and deployment planning Build strong relationships with provosts, CIOs, IT leaders, academic, and technical stakeholders and help align institutional goals with OpenAI capabilities Translate customer objectives into an actionable adoption roadmap with clear sequencing, milestones, and KPIs Partner with Solutions Architecture, Product, Engineering and Research by surfacing customer feedback, field patterns, and technical blockers and act as a cross functional navigator who keeps teams aligned, informed, and moving toward customer outcomes Guide value realization through student, faculty, and institutional outcomes such as engagement, research productivity, operational efficiency, and learning impact, supported by baselines and reporting Facilitate workshops for faculty, staff, and administrators on use case design, adoption best practices, champion building, and institution-wide enablement Help drive expansions by identifying high leverage opportunities where OpenAI’s platform can power new workflows or lines of business Serve as the technical advisor for existing customer implementations by guiding and optimizing account setup, configuration, etc. You’ll thrive in this role if you: 8+ years of experience in technical customer facing roles such as technical account management, technical GenAI consulting, solutions architecture, technical delivery leadership, or deep technical enterprise SaaS adoption work Experience working with education institutions is preferred but not necessary Deep, hands-on knowledge of OpenAI product capabilities, APIs, SDKs, connectors, and common integration patterns and able to explain model behavior, limitations, technical tradeoffs, embeddings, retrieval augmentation, and approaches to fine-tuning or custom model usage. Can translate technical concepts into clear business language and help customers understand the strategic impact of AI technologies Are comfortable embedding with customers to map workflows, identify requirements, and diagnose adoption challenges Have excellent project and program management instincts and can lead multi workstream initiatives with clarity and structure Enjoy being a thought partner for executive level stakeholders while also diving deep with technical teams Operate with high ownership and can manage fast decision making, context switching, and dynamic customer needs Have a strong record of driving technical deployments with hands-on on customer work and owning impactful adoption and value for large institutions with complex environments and multiple stakeholders About OpenAI OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicate