The opportunity
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,…
What you'll 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.
What they're looking for
- 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.
- + years of professional experience spanning GTM-adjacent technical work: (solutions consulting/architecture, field or forward-deployed engineering, technical GTM strategy) and hands-on building
- + years leading senior individual contributors, with evidence you developed and retained them