Director, Applied AI Architects

About the Role

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.

You will lead this team. That means defining how a new role category operates, owning the portfolio of engagements across the business, and answering for the outcomes: adoption that persists, workflows that measurably improve, and committed bets that read out in business metrics like sales ramp time, quota capacity, and competitive win rate.

This is a player-coach role. You will carry enough build and field surface yourself to keep your judgment current, while your primary output is the team: who they are, where they embed, what they ship, and whether it works. You inherit the hiring manager seat for all Architect roles, a unified interview loop, and an operating model with real momentum. What the function becomes from there is yours to shape, in close partnership with our Director of Applied AI Product, the CIO and CTO organizations, and the leaders of the functions your team serves.

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.
• 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.

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

Bonus Points

• You have led forward-deployed engineering or applied AI teams at a model lab, an AI-native company, or a scaled enterprise SaaS business
• You have shipped with modern agentic tooling (Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, custom agent frameworks, MCP-style integrations) and enterprise GTM stacks (Salesforce, Gong, Slack, Snowflake)
• You have run engagement- or rotation-based operating models (consulting, embedded product teams, customer zero programs)
• You have hired for hard-to-define roles and built interview systems that actually predicted performance

Why This Role Matters

The judgment of a company's best practitioners has always been its scarcest asset. The technology now exists to encode that judgment into systems that deliver it at scale, and Braze has committed the budget, the executive backing, and the operating model to do it. What the function needs now is the leader who turns a funded plan and a strong first hire into a team the rest of the company builds its expectations around. The window to define this role category, inside Braze and across the industry, is open right now.

For candidates based in the United States, the pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $193,000 and $304,000/year, with an expected On Target Earnings (OTE) between $241,000 and $345,000/year (including bonus or commission).Your exact offer may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to cash compensation, this role qualifies for a comprehensive Total Rewards package that includes equity grants of restricted stock (RSUs) so that you will own a piece of our company.

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