Lead Deployment Architect - AI

The Team

Celonis Services is the delivery engine of our Celonis Customer Organization, responsible for turning the Celonis platform into measurable, business-critical outcomes for our customers. In the AI era, our role has elevated: as AI agents, like our own Apollo, take on more of the technical build, our people focus on the work that drives real impact—understanding our customers’ business-critical problems, designing the solutions that solve them, and quantifying the value delivered. Our Deployment Engineers and Deployment Architects pair deep domain and industry expertise with serious platform mastery and AI-augmented delivery, directing agentic systems while owning the judgment, architecture, and customer relationships that AI cannot replace. We deliver faster and smarter than ever, and we own the outcome: data pipelines, user facing applications, initial value realization, adoption, and the long-term success of our customers.

The Role

As a Lead Deployment Architect - AI, you are the most senior technical authority within delivery. You own the end-to-end solution architecture for your portfolio of strategic customer engagements - from data foundation through process intelligence, operational apps, automation, and the governance that keeps it all running in production. You define what good delivery looks like, set the architectural standards other teams follow, and stay hands-on enough to prove them.

The majority of your work is designing and delivering robust, scalable enterprise solutions end to end: data integration and data strategy, solution (end-user application) design, security and user access, change management, and the operational discipline that sustains value after go-live. AI-augmented delivery is woven throughout - you are fluent in directing agentic tooling and you orchestrate it to move faster and smarter - but your value is the architecture, the judgment, and customers’ trust.

You are equally comfortable leading a technical design review with Celonis Deployment Engineers and presenting a transformation roadmap to a customer’s senior leadership. You bridge pre-sales and post-sales, scoping and estimating effort before a deal closes and ensuring that what was promised can be delivered - and often shaping the promise itself. You carry significant organizational influence: you set delivery patterns, resolve escalations on complex engagements, and raise the bar for the entire practice.

As a member of our Advanced AI Practice, you are a Deployment Architect first and an AI specialist second. Every Deployment Architect brings AI into their solutions; you are the person who knows when a problem calls for a machine learning model or an AI system that acts on its own, which approach fits, and how to prove it works before a customer relies on it. On our most complex engagements you work alongside a Deployment Architect: they lead the business questions and the overall architecture, while you decide which parts of the solution run on fixed business rules, which on AI reasoning or predictions, and how each part is tested and monitored in production. Where AI is the core of the solution, you lead the architecture yourself. You belong to both our Deployment Architect Practice and a global community of Advanced AI specialists, and you help set the standards and patterns the rest of Celonis Services builds on.

The Work You’ll Do

Platform Architecture & Design

• Own end-to-end platform architecture for complex enterprise deployments spanning multiple process areas, business units, systems, and geographies.
• Define the technical blueprint for how the Celonis platform integrates with customer systems and data strategies - designing secure, scalable architectures optimized for long-term usage growth, high concurrency, and maintainability.
• Make and defend architectural trade-off decisions - build vs. configure, custom vs. standard, phased vs. big-bang - with clear rationale tied to customer outcomes.
• Own solution quality across engagements, conducting design and code reviews and ensuring delivery teams follow architectural standards through to production readiness.

Delivery Leadership & Scoping

• Lead delivery end to end on your most complex engagements, setting technical direction and making the calls that remove dependencies and resolve escalations against timeline, scope, and customer expectations.
• Support pre-sales by scoping Services, estimating effort, and validating solution feasibility - ensuring the right Services are positioned in line with the proposed solution architecture, and that what is sold can be delivered and scaled in production.
• Stay hands-on with the newest Celonis capabilities, owning the implementation of early-stage products for customers and maintaining close feedback cycles with Product & Engineering.
• Govern the solution for the long run, defining the operating model: monitoring, access and security controls, change management, and how quality holds as the solution scales.

Customer Strategy & Advisory

• Serve as the senior technical advisor to strategic customers, building trusted relationships with VP-level and above executives at some of the world’s largest companies, and with their senior technology leaders (e.g., Lead Data Engineers, Enterprise Architects, Heads of Business Transformation).
• Translate business challenges into platform strategies, identifying high-impact use cases, defining success metrics, and framing the value case in outcomes, not features.
• Guide customers through their Process Intelligence maturity journey, advising on platform expansion, IT change management, data security, AI readiness, and organizational change, and bringing in the broader ecosystem of Celonis experts to take each delivery to the next level.

Domain & Industry Depth

• Develop and maintain deep expertise in one or more process domains (e.g., Supply Chain, Order to Cash, Procure to Pay, IT Service Management) or industry verticals.
• Translate domain knowledge into scalable solution patterns, reference architectures, and best practices the broader team can reuse, collaborating with Product and Business Apps teams to shape the platform roadmap.

Advanced AI Practice Development

• Mentor Deployment Engineers and Deployment Architects on AI solution design, model evaluation, and production guardrails through design and code reviews, and help them grow toward Advanced AI roles.
• Contribute to hiring: define what great looks like for Advanced AI roles in the Deployment job family, conduct interviews, and calibrate candidate assessments.
• Give back to the Advanced AI Practice alongside client work: turn one-off AI builds into reusable templates, host open office hours, and help close known AI gaps across Celonis Services.
• Feed lessons from production AI deployments back to Product & Engineering for native platform feature development, including our internal AI delivery tooling.

The Qualifications You Need

• Experience: 8+ years in technical consulting, forward deployed engineering, solution / enterprise architecture, or delivery leadership within enterprise software, consulting firms, or system integrators - including at least 3 years in a senior or lead technical role with multi-stakeholder responsibility on large-scale enterprise projects.
• Architecture skills: Proven ability to design and deliver complex, end-to-end enterprise solutions spanning data integration, process intelligence, operational apps, and automation - grounded in the “art of the possible” of a customer’s process. Deep understanding of enterprise architecture patterns, security and governance, and trade-offs.
• Technical Skills: Deep and demonstrable knowledge of SQL, Python, Bash / Shell scripting and use of REST / SOAP APIs. Familiarity with other general purpose programming languages (e.g. Golang, Javascript / Typescript, Java, or equivalent).
• Platform mastery: Expert-level knowledge of the Celonis platform, including the Process Intelligence Graph, data modeling, advanced PQL, Python scripting, and the automation and orchestration engine. Ability to push the platform’s boundaries.
• AI solution architecture: You design solutions that combine fixed business rules, AI reasoning (e.g., large language models), predictive and statistical models, and optimization, and you can explain why each part of the solution uses the approach it does. You direct AI-assisted and agentic development tools (e.g., Apollo, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor) as part of day-to-day delivery.
• Production AI delivery: You have taken machine learning and/or statistical models into production for customers or business users, or designed and delivered an end-to-end agentic system that takes actions on its own. In either case, you chose the approach, defined how to measure whether it was right, and built the guardrails and monitoring that catch it when it isn’t. (A degree in ML, statistics, data science, or a related quantitative field is a plus, but is not required.)
• Customer executive presence: Track record of building trusted advisor relationships with senior stakeholders, presenting transformation strategies, defending architectural decisions, and navigating complex IT landscapes and organizational dynamics.
• Delivery & consulting leadership: Experience owning technical delivery and escalations end to end, scoping and estimating effort in pre-sales, and leading workshops, design sessions, and strategic reviews with senior stakeholders.
• Leadership & mentoring: Demonstrated ability to raise the performance of the teams around you - mentoring technical staff, setting quality standards, and contributing to organizational capability. (Formal people-management experience is a plus, but not a requirement.)
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Mathematics, Engineering, Technology Management, Business Informatics, or a comparable field.
• Travel: Willingness to travel to customer locations as required by project delivery phases.

Visa Sponsorship is not available for this role

The base salary range below is for the role in California, based on a Full Time Schedule. 195000 - 215000 USD