Director, Applied AI Architects

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