Director, Applied AI Architects

Role details

At Braze, we have found our people. We’re a genuinely approachable, exceptionally kind, and intensely passionate crew. We seek to ignite that passion by setting high standards, championing teamwork, and creating work-life harmony as we collectively navigate rapid growth on a global scale while striving for greater equity and opportunity – inside and outside our organization. To flourish here, you must be prepared to set a high bar for yourself and those around you. There is always a way to contribute: Acting with autonomy, having accountability and being open to new perspectives are essential to our continued success. Our deep curiosity to learn and our eagerness to share diverse passions with others gives us balance and injects a one-of-a-kind vibrancy into our culture. If you are driven to solve exhilarating challenges and have a bias toward action in the face of change, you will be empowered to make a real impact here, with a sharp and passionate team at your back. If Braze sounds like a place where you can thrive, we can’t wait to meet you. 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 differe