---
title: 'Manager, Applied AI Architects at OpenAI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/manager-applied-ai-architects-openai-munich-net3wca3zkjn'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-17'
---

# Manager, Applied AI Architects at OpenAI

- **Company:** [OpenAI](https://feeny.ai/companies/openai)
- **Location:** Munich, Germany
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-01
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/e45913b7-b84d-49d3-a0b6-c19b55185272

## Job description

## About the Team

The Applied AI Architect team partners with organizations to turn OpenAI's most capable models into meaningful, real-world impact. We work with customers across industries 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.

## About the Role

As the Manager of Applied AI Architects in Munich, 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 across the DACH region. 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 ChatGPT Enterprise, the OpenAI API, Codex, and other agentic AI solutions. In close partnership with Sales leadership and Account Directors, you will help prioritize customer portfolios, allocate technical resources, and ensure 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. You will serve 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. This role is based in Munich. We use a hybrid work model of 3 days in the office per week and offer relocation assistance to new employees.

In this role, you will:

- Hire, coach, and develop a high-performing team of Applied AI Architects, creating an environment of technical excellence, sound judgment, continuous learning, accountability, and strong customer stewardship.
- Define and continuously refine the strategy and operating model for Applied AI Architecture across Europe, aligning company priorities with the evolving needs of strategic customers and the regional go-to-market.
- Partner with Sales leadership and Account Directors to prioritize accounts and opportunities, allocate technical resources effectively, and establish clear technical strategies for the region's most consequential engagements.
- Ensure Applied AI Architects serve as the primary technical advisors for their portfolios, owning technical account plans, technical milestones, adoption priorities, account health, and expansion opportunities.
- Lead complex, multi-threaded customer journeys that connect executive vision and business outcomes with use-case qualification, solution evaluation, enterprise governance, and a credible path to production.
- Coach the team on Applied AI architectures spanning models, applications, data, integration, identity, security, privacy, governance, evaluation, reliability, and deployment.
- Build trusted relationships with C-suite and board-level stakeholders, as well as senior AI, technology, data, security, and engineering leaders, serving as an executive technical sponsor when needed.
- Mobilize Deployment Engineering, implementation, enablement, Product, Engineering, Research, Security, Legal, Privacy, partners, and other specialists to remove blockers and deliver a cohesive customer experience.
- Establish a rigorous view of portfolio health, including technical wins, qualified use cases, production readiness, adoption, usage, risks, measurable customer impact, and the technical contribution to growth.
- Translate patterns from the field into actionable feedback for Product, Engineering, Research, and go-to-market teams, while developing reusable architecture guidance and customer practices.
- Foster a culture that balances ambitious customer outcomes with responsible AI deployment, clear ownership, thoughtful prioritization, and effective specialist handoffs.

You might thrive in this role if you:

- Possess 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.
- Bring 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 and complex enterprises.
- Have 4+ years of people-management experience hiring, coaching, and developing high-performing customer-facing technical teams.
- Have guided enterprise organizations from technical discovery and evaluation through production adoption, healthy usage, and measurable business impact.
- Demonstrate outstanding executive communication and presentation skills, with the ability to build credibility with CTOs, CIOs, CISOs, boards, business leaders, and hands-on engineers.
- Can lead a complex portfolio, make thoughtful resource-allocation decisions, and balance regional strategy with hands-on support for critical customer engagements.
- Exercise strong architectural judgment, including knowing when to go deep personally, when to coach the team, when to involve specialists, and how to define clear handoffs and ownership.
- Build strong partnerships across Sales, Product, Engineering, Research, Deployment, Customer Engagement, Security, Legal, Privacy, and external partner ecosystems.
- Are comfortable leading across DACH and partnering across European markets from Munich, adapting your approach to different industries, cultures, regulatory contexts, and customer operating models.
- Embody a customer-centric philosophy focused on durable value, responsible production adoption, technical excellence, and long-term partnership.
- Approach your work with humility, curiosity, a collaborative spirit, and a deep commitment to the safe and beneficial advancement of AI.

## 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. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations. To notify OpenAI that you believe this job posting is non-compliant, please submit a report through [this form](https://form.asana.com/?d=57018692298241&k=5MqR40fZd7jlxVUh5J-UeA). No response will be provided to inquiries unrelated to job posting compliance. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to applicants with disabilities, and requests can be made via this [link](https://form.asana.com/?k=bQ7w9h3iexRlicUdWRiwvg&d=57018692298241). [OpenAI Global Applicant Privacy Policy](https://cdn.openai.com/policies/global-employee-and-contractor-privacy-policy.pdf) At OpenAI, we believe artificial intelligence has the potential to help people solve immense global challenges, and we want the upside of AI to be widely shared. Join us in shaping the future of technology.

## About OpenAI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company with a mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
- **Entity Type**: Private – structured as a nonprofit parent (OpenAI Foundation) governing a for-profit public benefit corporation (OpenAI Group). The company has confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC, signaling a potential future IPO.
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, and others

## Core Business
- **Primary industry**: Artificial intelligence research and deployment
- **Target customers**: B2B (enterprises via API and platform), B2C (ChatGPT users), and developers (API, open-source models)
- **Mission**: To ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) – AI systems that are generally smarter than humans – benefits all of humanity.

## Products & Services
- **[ChatGPT](https://openai.com/chatgpt)**: Conversational AI assistant available via web and mobile, used by consumers and integrated into enterprise workflows.
- **[GPT-4 API](https://openai.com/product)**: Large language model accessed via API for developers to build AI-powered applications (text generation, summarization, code assistance, etc.).
- **[DALL-E](https://openai.com/dall-e-3)**: Image generation model that creates images from natural language descriptions.
- **[Whisper](https://openai.com/research/whisper)**: Open-source speech recognition system.
- **[OpenAI Agents](https://openai.com/)**: Emerging product category focused on autonomous AI agents that can perform tasks on behalf of users (announced June 2026).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed in the provided sources. Widely reported in the press at ~$300 billion as of early 2026 (post-funding round), but this figure is not confirmed by OpenAI’s official materials.
- **Key Metric**: Total funding exceeds $13 billion from Microsoft and other investors. The company has also confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC (see [openai.com](https://openai.com/) – “Confidential submission of draft S-1”).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Microsoft (strategic partner and largest investor), with additional participation from Thrive Capital, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
- **Growth Signals**: Active hiring with 721 open roles posted; expansion into agent-based products; confidential IPO filing; continued deployment of frontier models.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-mover & brand recognition**: ChatGPT became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, establishing OpenAI as the household name in generative AI.
- **Research leadership**: Consistently publishes cutting-edge research (GPT-4, DALL-E 3, Whisper, etc.) and attracts top AI talent.
- **Compute & infrastructure**: Exclusive partnership with Microsoft provides massive cloud computing resources (Azure) for training and inference.
- **Unique governance structure**: The nonprofit parent ensures mission alignment (AGI benefiting humanity) while the for-profit arm can raise capital and scale products.

## Strategic Focus
- **Safe AGI development**: Continued emphasis on safety research, alignment, and responsible deployment (e.g., safety systems, model provenance).
- **Enterprise expansion**: Growing ChatGPT Enterprise and API offerings for businesses.
- **Agentic AI**: Building autonomous agents that can “transform work” (announced June 2026).
- **IPO preparation**: Confidential S-1 filing indicates intent to go public, which will require increased financial transparency and governance maturity.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture & values**: OpenAI’s stated values include “Humanity first,” “Act with humility,” “Feel the AGI,” and “Ship joy.” Operating principles emphasize agency, creativity, rapid iteration, and intense focus.
- **Benefits**: Competitive health insurance, mental healthcare support, 24-week paid birth-parent leave (plus 20 weeks for other parents), generous PTO, annual learning & development stipend, daily meals (breakfast, lunch, dinner), and a domestic conference budget.
- **Work environment**: Hybrid/office-based (San Francisco headquarters). The company offers a residency program for researchers and engineers transitioning into AI.
- **Impact**: Employees work directly on frontier AI models that shape the industry and society. The mission-driven nature attracts talent passionate about AGI’s societal implications.

## Sources
1. [OpenAI About Page](https://openai.com/about/)
2. [OpenAI Careers Page](https://openai.com/careers/)
3. [OpenAI Job Search](https://openai.com/careers/search)
4. [OpenAI Homepage](https://openai.com/)

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