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 105 of 105 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 | 57%(60) | 5 | $245k |
| Senior | 38%(40) | 5 | $248k |
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 Most companies do not publish a salary band, so pay is indicative rather than a market rate. 2 levels with fewer than 10 open postings are not shown.
“proficient in Python, JavaScript, and a strong grasp of AI/LLM best practices”
“Build and validate tools that help partners find new uses for approved, mostly off-patent medicines using Claude”
“Design, build, and optimize enterprise-grade AI agents in production”
“Design, build, and deploy agentic AI workflows — multi-step agents, tool and function calling, and automations”
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
Customer education programs
Cloud and data platform architecture
Enterprise AI solution architecture
AI evaluation design
LLM application development
AI transformation advisory
Agent system architecture and development
Agent workflow design
Prompt and context engineering
AI governance and trust advisory
AI safety and guardrails
AI capability positioning
AI-assisted development workflow
Customer-facing technical delivery
Technical communication
Cross-functional collaboration
Executive relationship building
Rapid prototyping and iteration
Ownership in ambiguity
Technology
The tools and technologies that define this role.
Open Jobs
105 open Applied AI Architect jobs across 11 companies.
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