Applied AI Architect
Applied AI Architects serve as the senior technical owner for a customer portfolio, acting as the "CTO of their book of business" and guiding organizations from pre-sales discovery through deployment and adoption of LLM-powered solutions. They translate business or mission priorities into focused use-case portfolios and actionable adoption roadmaps, balancing hands-on prototyping and architecture design with executive-level strategy conversations. What sets this role apart is its accountability for both technical outcomes and customer success across a named set of accounts, sitting in the GTM organization rather than the product team, and the ability to orchestrate specialists across deployment, enablement, security, and product while maintaining the primary technical relationship with leadership.
Measured across 87 of 87 open postings.
This role is advertised at 2 levels, so a single figure for the role would describe none of them. Experience and pay are the midpoints for each level on its own.
| Level | Share | Median years | Median pay |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid | 54%(47) | 5 | $245k |
| Senior | 44%(38) | 5 | $250k |
A dash means too few postings stated it to report a midpoint. Most companies do not publish a salary band, so pay is indicative rather than a market rate. 2 levels with fewer than 10 open postings are not shown.
“write and debug code, build evaluation systems, resolve complex integrations, and guide decisions involving model behavior”
“architect innovative LLM solutions that address complex mission challenges while maintaining our high standards for safety and reliability”
Requirements are a share of every open posting, so a role missing from this list is one where almost nobody asks. Work mode is different: many postings never say, so that figure counts only the ones that do. A posting stops being advertised when it is filled, cancelled or reorganised, so read the last figure as how long these stay on the market, not as time to hire.
Skills
What companies are looking for in this role.
Technical solution advisory
Technical pre-sales solution design
Proof-of-concept and pilot execution
Full-stack product engineering
Discovery and opportunity qualification
Cloud and data platform architecture
Business value and ROI modeling
Developer advocacy and technical content
Enterprise AI solution architecture
AI evaluation design
LLM application development
AI transformation advisory
Agent workflow design
AI governance and trust advisory
Prompt and context engineering
Agent system architecture and development
AI capability positioning
Hands-on AI tool fluency
Customer-facing technical delivery
Technical communication
Executive relationship building
Rapid prototyping and iteration
Ownership in ambiguity
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
87 open Applied AI Architect jobs across 10 companies.
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