Applied AI Architect, G&A (Chicago)

This job is with Braze, an inclusive employer and a member of myGwork – the largest global platform for the LGBTQ+ business community. Please do not contact the recruiter directly.

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.

Braze is building an Applied AI function to change how every team at the company works. Not as a center of excellence that publishes best practices from a distance, but as a team of practitioners partnering directly with business units to make AI the default starting point for work.

Within that function, Applied AI Architects, G&A carry the horizontal mandate. They rotate across the company's corporate functions — Finance, People, Legal, Operations, IT and Business Systems, and beyond — embedding with one function at a time to find the highest-value workflows, rebuild them around AI alongside the people who own them, and leave each team able to keep going without us. A sibling team, Applied AI Architects, GTM, applies the same craft permanently attached to specific stages of the revenue lifecycle; this role is the broad-coverage, rotational counterpart.

We are product-minded and outcome-driven. We treat the people we serve as users and their workflows as product surfaces, we build on shared infrastructure, and we tune what we ship based on adoption, output quality, and business impact. Braze employees are already building agents that compress multi-day workflows into minutes and tools that transform processes like research, reporting, and operational escalations. This team exists to accelerate that impact and systematically scale it across Braze.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

As an Applied AI Architect, G&A, you'll embed with a functional team or cross-functional cohort of approximately 15–25 people, learn their work deeply, and rebuild their highest-leverage workflows around AI alongside them. You'll operate across three modes: as the researcher who finds where the real friction and opportunity live, as the builder who designs and ships working agents on shared infrastructure, and as the coach who moves a team from its first contact with AI to self-sufficiency — and then rotates to the next function.

Unlike your GTM counterparts, you are not permanently attached to one area. Your measure of success is durable business impact aligned to key financial and efficiency goals, adoption that persists after you rotate out, and cohorts that can build for themselves.

• Run enablement and discovery across your assigned functions. Lead enablement sessions and stakeholder research across the teams you cover (e.g., Finance, People, Legal, Operations) to map where intelligence gaps, manual effort, workflow friction, and handoff failures are most acute. Translate findings into a structured, prioritized backlog of problems to solve — problem statements, impact and feasibility scoring, dependencies, and stakeholders — and use it to decide where to dig in and rebuild process first.
• Build alongside the team. Create custom tools, agents, automations, and prompts tailored to the highest-value workflows, contributing directly to system architecture, retrieval logic, and output calibration on top of shared infrastructure. Ship working solutions on real deliverables, not theoretical demos.
• Coach toward self-sufficiency. Move people through a progressive maturity model: from awareness, to first win, to regular AI integration, to full workflow transformation, to self-sufficiency. Meet people where they are, and teach them to build and iterate on their own tools over time. The goal is independence, not dependence on you.
• Own quality during the engagement, then hand the durable pieces up. Monitor adoption, diagnose output failures, and tune continuously while you're embedded. As the engagement matures, transition the cohort's load-bearing agents into the shared platform layer so they run durably after you rotate out — you operate what you ship until it's productized, not before.
• Recognize patterns and scale what works. A tool built for one team should become reusable infrastructure for the next. Document every tool, playbook, and transformation pattern you create so the full team can compound each other's work.
• Build momentum. Share wins visibly within your cohort and with leadership to create pull demand and celebrate what's working. Track individual and cohort progress against the maturity model.
• Know when to rotate. An engagement completes when a defined share of the cohort can build and modify their own tools and its load-bearing agents have been productized into the platform layer. Then you move to the next function.
• Prepare cohorts for an agentic future . Not just prompt writing, but designing, building, and overseeing autonomous multi-agent workflows that handle real business processes.

WHO YOU ARE

We're looking for people who have already lived the transformation they'll be driving for others. You've used AI to fundamentally change how you work, and you can show your work.

• You are a builder and deep AI practitioner. You build agents, automations, and tools fluently. You don't just know what AI can do in theory; you've built things that changed how real work gets done, and you can build in real time alongside the people you support. You can scope and prioritize solutions, contribute to system architecture and retrieval design, evaluate outputs for quality, and diagnose why something missed at the system level rather than just the content level.
• You are a researcher and systems thinker. You can walk into a function you don't know, run the interviews and sessions that surface where the real friction is, and turn what you hear into a prioritized, defensible backlog. When you build something that works for one person or team, you immediately see how it applies to ten others, and you think in reusable components and scalable playbooks.
• You are an exceptional coach and communicator. You can meet people wherever they are, from skeptical to enthusiastic. You create desire for progress and adapt your approach to each person. You know that adoption is a human problem, not a technology problem.
• You think like a product leader. When you identify a gap, you scope the problem, define the user, map the workflow, and build the solution. You treat the people you serve as your users and their workflows as your product surface, and you know the difference between shipping something and shipping something people actually use.
• You understand how business functions run. You've worked in or closely with the kinds of teams you'll be embedded in (finance, people, legal, operations). You know that understanding someone's work is a prerequisite to transforming it.
• You are biased toward action and speed. You'd rather show someone a working proof-of-concept on their actual deliverable today than present a polished deck about what's theoretically possible next quarter.
• You are comfortable with ambiguity. This is a new team building a new operating model at Braze. The playbook will be rewritten as we learn, and you thrive in that environment.
• 5+ years of professional experience in a role requiring analytical thinking, problem-solving, and cross-functional collaboration
• Demonstrated, hands-on experience building AI-powered tools, agents, automations, or workflows that transformed real work processes (not just using AI as a chatbot), with concrete examples you can speak to in depth
• Experience running discovery or stakeholder research and translating it into a prioritized plan of work — problem statements, impact and feasibility assessment, and clear next steps
• Technical fluency sufficient to engage credibly on integration architecture, evaluate agent outputs at the system level, and contribute to prompt design, retrieval logic, and data workflows (e.g., Python, APIs, integrations) without always requiring translation from an engineering counterpart
• Track record of coaching, teaching, or enabling others, with evidence that people you've worked with actually changed how they work
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical audiences and adapt your approach to different learners
• Comfort working across multiple workstreams and relationships simultaneously (you'll be supporting 15–25 people at varying stages of their AI journey)
• Product Management background or experience, with demonstrated ability to ship things people actually use
• Experience in finance, people/HR, legal, operations, or a closely adjacent business function
• Proficiency with AI development tools and platforms (e.g., Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, custom agent frameworks, API integrations, w]]>