Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
This Solutions Architect role sits at a notable intersection in SaaS: taking a developer-facing API platform and translating it into production-grade deployments for public sector institutions. In the current SaaS landscape, where GenAI capabilities are increasingly delivered as subscription services and platform primitives, the work centers on de-risking real-world adoption—architecture choices, integration pathways, and operational readiness—rather than purely conceptual solutioning.
From a SaaS career standpoint, the position builds durable experience in “customer-to-product” loops that are especially valuable in platform companies. It involves shaping a backlog of use cases, moving prototypes into production, and turning field learnings into reusable assets and internal best practices. The cross-functional touchpoints—Sales, Product, Applied Research, and external integrators—mirror how modern SaaS organizations scale technical adoption and refine positioning without relying solely on feature delivery.
This role is best suited to practitioners who enjoy being embedded with stakeholders, can operate as a technical thought partner, and are comfortable owning ambiguous problems end-to-end. It will particularly fit professionals motivated by regulated environments and long implementation cycles, where clarity, documentation, and risk management are as important as hands-on building.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
Job Description
About the team
The Solutions Architecture team is responsible for ensuring the safe and effective deployment of Generative AI applications. We act as a trusted advisor and thought partner for our customers, working to build an effective backlog of GenAI use cases for their industry and drive them to production through strong technical guidance. As the founding Solutions Architect in the Public Sector segment, you’ll help government agencies transform their organization through solutions such as automated content generation, contextual search, and novel applications that make use of our newest, most exciting models and technology.
About the Role
We are looking for a driven solutions leader with a product mindset to partner with our public sector customers and ensure they achieve tangible value with GenAI. You will pair with government agencies (federal, state, and local), policymakers, and other public institutions to establish a GenAI strategy and identify the highest value applications. You’ll then partner with their technical teams, subject matter experts, systems integrators, and implementation partners to move from prototype through production. You’ll take a holistic view of their needs and design an architecture using the OpenAI API and other services to maximize customer value. You will collaborate closely with Sales, Solutions Engineering, Global Affairs, Applied Research, and Product teams.
This role is based in Washington, DC. We offer relocation support to new employees.
In this role, you will:
Deeply embed with our most sophisticated public sector customers as the technical lead, serving as their technical thought partner to ideate and build novel applications on our API.
Work with senior customer stakeholders to identify the best applications of GenAI in their industry and to build/qualify a comprehensive backlog to support their AI roadmap.
Intervene directly to accelerate customer time to value through building hands-on prototypes and/or by delivering impactful strategic guidance, often in collaboration with systems integrators and implementation partners.
Forge and manage relationships with our customers’ and implementation partners’ leadership and stakeholders to ensure the successful deployment and scale of their applications.
Contribute to our open-source developer and enterprise resources.
Scale the Solutions Architect function through sharing knowledge, codifying best practices, and publishing notebooks to our internal and external repositories.
Validate, synthesize, and deliver high-signal feedback to the Product, Engineering, and Research teams.
You’ll thrive in this role if you:
Bring 7+ years of technical consulting (or equivalent) experience with public sector customers (U.S. federal preferred), bridging technical teams and senior stakeholders.
Active TS/SCI clearance
Have successfully led GenAI or traditional ML implementations for government agencies in close collaboration with systems integrators and implementation partners.
Understand network and cloud architecture, including experience with on-premise deployments.
Are an effective and polished communicator who can translate business and technical topics to all audiences.
Have industry experience in programming languages like Python or Javascript.
Own problems end-to-end and are willing to pick up whatever knowledge you're missing to get the job done.
Have a humble attitude, an eagerness to help your colleagues, and a desire to do whatever it takes to make the team succeed.
Are an effective, high throughput operator who can drive multiple concurrent projects and prioritize ruthlessly.
About OpenAI
OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company dedicated to ensuring that general-purpose artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. We push the boundaries of the capabilities of AI systems and seek to safely deploy them to the world through our products. AI is an extremely powerful tool that must be created with safety and human needs at its core, and to achieve our mission, we must encompass and value the many different perspectives, voices, and experiences that form the full spectrum of humanity.
We are an equal opportunity employer, and we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, age, veteran status, disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.
For additional information, please see OpenAI’s Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity Policy Statement.
Background checks for applicants will be administered in accordance with applicable law, and qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records will be considered for employment consistent with those laws, including the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, for US-based candidates. For unincorporated Los Angeles County workers: we reasonably believe that criminal history may have a direct, adverse and negative relationship with the following job duties, potentially resulting in the withdrawal of a conditional offer of employment: protect computer hardware entrusted to you from theft, loss or damage; return all computer hardware in your possession (including the data contained therein) upon termination of employment or end of assignment; and maintain the confidentiality of proprietary, confidential, and non-public information. In addition, job duties require access to secure and protected information technology systems and related data security obligations.
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