Director, Applied AI Architects

Braze, New York City

The role

If you are driven to solve exhilarating challenges and have a bias toward action in the face of change, you will be empowered to make a real impact here, with a sharp and passionate team at your back. If Braze sounds like a place where you can thrive, we can’t wait to meet you.

Braze is making AI the default way of working across the company. Our Applied AI Architects are forward-deployed practitioners who combine domain judgment with hands-on build capability: they embed with business teams, treat employees as users and workflows as product surfaces, and ship working agents on shared infrastructure. The function runs in two tracks. GTM Architects are permanently embedded in the GTM organization, each owning a portion of a customer and prospect lifecycle that spans Marketing, Sales, Customer Success, and Support; when they address friction in one stage, they work the surrounding levers holistically, mapping how those functions connect today and how AI could connect them better.

G&A Architects rotate across corporate functions like Finance, People, Legal, and Operations, driving each cohort to self-sufficiency.

All jobs

Director, Applied AI Architects

Braze, New York City

The role

G&A Architects rotate across corporate functions like Finance, People, Legal, and Operations, driving each cohort to self-sufficiency.

What you will do

Build the team. Close the open Architect reqs across both tracks (GTM and G&A), then own onboarding, development, and performance for a team of senior, highly autonomous ICs operating in a role category that barely exists in the market. Define what good looks like and what the career path is.
Own the engagement portfolio. Decide where Architects embed, what they prioritize, and when they rotate or scale back. Balance permanent GTM surface ownership against rotational G&A engagements. Say no to good ideas so the team ships great ones.
Answer for the bets. Own delivery and measurement of the committed GTM bets (sales ramp time, quota capacity / customer-facing time, competitive win rate) and run the promotion pipeline for G&A candidate bets. Every bet pairs a business outcome with leading indicators; you keep both honest.
Run the operating discipline. Enforce the engagement lifecycle (discovery, prioritization, readout, design, build, deliver, monitor) and the cohort maturity model. Adoption is the bar: an ignored output is a bug, and your team operates what it ships until it is productized.
Stay hands-on. Review agent designs, specs, and output quality at the system level. Carry a build surface of your own. Your field and build credibility is what earns the team its seat in pipeline reviews and functional staff meetings.
Compound through the platform. Partner with the Director of Applied AI Product to move field-proven patterns into shared infrastructure, and to feed field reality back into platform requirements, evaluation criteria, and measurement frameworks.
Be the executive interface. Negotiate embed agreements with CRO and CBO leadership and functional executives, represent the function's results and roadmap to senior leadership, and protect your team's focus when demand outstrips capacity, which it will.
Write the playbook. The role category is being defined in real time across the industry. Document what works, publish it internally, and make Braze a reference point for how a scaled SaaS company runs applied AI.

What you need

Who You Are

A proven leader of senior technical ICs. You have built and led high-autonomy teams: forward-deployed engineering, solutions consulting or architecture, field engineering, or an applied AI/ML group. You know how to manage outcomes without hovering, and how to coach people more specialized than you.
A builder with current hands. You have personally built AI agents, automations, or LLM-powered tools that changed how real work gets done, and you can evaluate someone else's system design, retrieval logic, and output quality without an interpreter.
Credible in the field. You have spent real time in or alongside the commercial motion of a B2B SaaS company. You can sit in a pipeline review, an EBR, or a functional leadership meeting and have the room take you seriously.
A portfolio operator. You think in terms of impact, feasibility, and sequencing across many competing demands, and you can defend your prioritization to executives who wanted a different answer.
Fluent in measurement. You can design a baseline, argue a leading indicator, dollarize an efficiency gain, and tell the difference between a metric that proves a mechanism and one that flatters a narrative.
A zero-to-one leader. You have stood up a function, practice, or team where no playbook existed, and you are comfortable being accountable for results while the ground is still moving.

Minimum Requirements

10+ years of professional experience spanning GTM-adjacent technical work (solutions consulting/architecture, field or forward-deployed engineering, technical GTM strategy) and hands-on building
3+ years leading senior individual contributors, with evidence you developed and retained them
Demonstrated, hands-on experience building AI-powered tools, agents, or workflows that transformed real work, with concrete examples you can speak to in depth
Track record of standing up a new team, practice, or function and scaling it past your own personal capacity
Executive-level communication and stakeholder management, including negotiating priorities with senior leaders
Experience defining and defending business-impact measurement for a technical team

About Braze

At Braze, we have found our people. We’re a genuinely approachable, exceptionally kind, and intensely passionate crew.

We seek to ignite that passion by setting high standards, championing teamwork, and creating work-life harmony as we collectively navigate rapid growth on a global scale while striving for greater equity and opportunity – inside and outside our organization.

To flourish here, you must be prepared to set a high bar for yourself and those around you. There is always a way to contribute: Acting with autonomy, having accountability and being open to new perspectives are essential to our continued success.

Our deep curiosity to learn and our eagerness to share diverse passions with others gives us balance and injects a one-of-a-kind vibrancy into our culture.

Braze is the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging™ Braze helps brands deliver great customer experiences that drive value both for consumers and for their businesses. Built on a foundation of composable intelligence, BrazeAI™ allows marketers to combine and activate AI agents, models, and features at every touchpoint throughout the Braze Customer Engagement Platform for smarter, faster, and more meaningful customer engagement.

From cross-channel messaging and journey orchestration to Al-powered decisioning and optimization, Braze enables companies to turn action into interaction through autonomous, 1:1 personalized experiences.

The company has repeatedly been recognized as a Leader in marketing technology by industry analysts, and was voted a G2 “Best of Marketing and Digital Advertising Software Product” in 2025.

Braze was also named a 2025 Best Companies To Work For by U.S. News and World Report, a 2025 America’s Greatest Companies by Newsweek, and a 2025 Fortune Best Workplace in Technology™ by Great Place To Work®, among other accolades. Braze is also proudly certified as a Great Place to Work® in the U.S., the UK, Australia, and Singapore.

The company is headquartered in New York with offices in Austin, Berlin, Bucharest, Chicago, Dubai, Jakarta, London, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore, Seoul, Sydney and Tokyo.

Director, Applied AI Architects

The role

Director, Applied AI Architects

The role

What you will do

What you need

Who You Are

Minimum Requirements

Nice to have

Why This Role Matters

Braze is an equal opportunity employer

Our AI-powered Braze recruitment process

Pay and benefits

About Braze

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