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: initial value realization, adoption, and the long-term success of our customers.

The Role

As a Lead Deployment Architect - AI (known internally Lead Deployment Architect) you are the technical authority for our strategic accounts within Celonis delivery. You shape how Celonis solutions are designed, architected, and delivered across your portfolio of strategic customer engagements. You define what good delivery looks like - setting architectural standards, designing end-to-end solution strategies, and ensuring that AI-augmented and agentic workflows are deployed effectively at scale.

You operate at the intersection of deep platform expertise, domain knowledge, and customer strategy. You are equally comfortable leading a technical design review with Celonis engineers and presenting a transformation roadmap to a customer’s C-suite. You bridge the gap between pre-sales and post-sales, ensuring that what was promised can be delivered - and often shaping the promise itself.

This role carries significant organizational leverage. You set delivery patterns that other teams follow. You define how AI agents should be orchestrated for complex, multi-workstream engagements. You work in close collaboration with Deployment Engineers and raise the bar for the entire practice.

The Work You’ll Do

Solution Architecture & Design

• Support Services scoping in pre-sales, ensuring the right Services are positioned in line with the Celonis solution architecture proposed
• Design end-to-end Celonis solution architectures for complex enterprise deployments, spanning multiple process areas, business units, and geographies
• Define the technical blueprint for how the Celonis platform integrates with customer systems, data strategies, and transformation goals
• Designing secure, scalable architectures tailored to complex enterprise requirements, optimizing for long-term usage growth and high concurrency.
• Make architectural trade-off decisions: build vs. configure, custom vs. standard, phased vs. big-bang - with clear rationale tied to customer outcomes
• Own solution quality & outcome delivery across engagements, conducting design reviews, and ensuring delivery teams follow architectural standards

AI Orchestration & Delivery Innovation

• Design how AI deployment agents (Apollo) should be used across complex, multi-workstream engagements, defining agent workflows, validation checkpoints, and quality gates
• Develop reusable specifications, templates, and patterns that enable Deployment Engineers to direct AI agents more effectively
• Pioneer new delivery approaches that leverage AI to compress timelines, improve quality, or unlock use cases that were previously impractical
• Set standards for AI output validation, ensuring the organization maintains quality as delivery accelerates

Customer Strategy & Advisory

• Serve as the senior technical advisor to strategic customers, building trusted relationships with VP and C-level stakeholders
• Translate customer business challenges into Celonis platform strategies, identifying high-impact use cases and defining success metrics
• Support pre-sales by providing technical credibility in complex deals, validating solution feasibility, and shaping project scope
• Guide customers through their Process Intelligence maturity journey, advising on platform expansion, AI readiness, and organizational change
• Leverage the broader ecosystem of Celonis experts to remove potential blockers in customer engagements
• Establish deep, technical advisor relationships with customer stakeholders (Lead Data Engineers and Architects, Head of Data Intelligence, Head of Business Transformation) to provide technical reassurance and maintain "Expert-to-Expert" alignment during the course of the deployment 

Successful Implementation

• Work together with Deployment Engineers on delivery projects to implement the most complex and cutting edge use cases for our customers
• Stay on top of the newest technologies Celonis has to offer and own the implementation of early stage products for our customers, ensuring close feedback cycles with Product & Engineering
• Review Solution(s) Blueprint to ensure quality, scalability and production readiness of business critical and operational use cases

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 that the broader team can leverage
• Proactively identify and standardize high-value use cases within your domain in collaboration with the Deployment Engineer, collaborating with Product and Business Apps teams to shape the platform roadmap

Practice Development

• Contribute to hiring: define what great looks like for the Deployment job family, conduct interviews, and calibrate candidate assessments
• Share knowledge across the organization through internal enablement sessions, documentation, and community of practice leadership
• Ensure the link with Product & Engineering to feed customer insights and field experience back into platform development, and to influence the platform roadmap

What Distinguishes This Role from Deployment Engineer

• Scope: You work across multiple engagements and shape solutions across a portfolio/cluster/industry vertical (4+ concurrent clients)
• Influence & Practice Development: your Scope allows you to identify and set standards that other teams follow - for solution architecture, AI orchestration patterns, and delivery quality
• Bridge: You span pre-sales and post-sales, ensuring continuity between what’s sold and what’s delivered
• Force multiplier: Your work multiplies the effectiveness of Deployment Engineers rather than substituting for it

The Qualifications You Need

• Experience: 8+ years in technical consulting, solution architecture, or delivery leadership within enterprise software, consulting firms, or system integrators. At least 3 years in a senior or lead technical role with multi-stakeholder responsibility in large-scale projects at tier-1 organizations (e.g. digital twin implementations, global AI transformations, near-real-time data pipelines, etc.) 
• Architecture skills: Proven ability to design complex, multi-component solutions that span data integration, process intelligence, automation, and AI, while remaining grounded in the “so-what” of a customer’s process. Deep understanding of enterprise architecture patterns and trade-offs.
• Platform mastery: Expert-level knowledge of the Celonis platform, including the Process Intelligence Graph, data modeling, advanced PQL, automation and orchestration engine, and AI modules. Ability to push the platform’s boundaries via a working knowledge of Python.
• AI & agent orchestration: Demonstrated ability to design AI-augmented delivery workflows leveraging frontier tooling (e.g., Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.). Experience with context engineering, multi-agent system design, or AI validation at scale. Ability to define how AI should be used, not just use it.
• Domain expertise: Deep knowledge in at least one major process domain or industry vertical. Ability to translate domain expertise into scalable solution patterns and credible customer advisory.
• Customer executive presence: Track record of building trusted advisor relationships with VP and C-level stakeholders. Ability to present transformation strategies, defend architectural decisions, and navigate complex organizational dynamics. Demonstrated experience navigating complex IT landscapes and communicating technical trade-offs to senior leadership.
• Consulting & communication: Exceptional ability to translate between technical and business audiences. Experience leading workshops, design sessions, and strategic reviews with senior stakeholders.
• Leadership & mentoring: Demonstrated ability to raise the performance of teams around you. Experience mentoring technical staff, setting quality standards, and contributing to organizational capability development.
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s in Computer Science, Engineering, Technology Management, Business Informatics, or a comparable field.
• Languages: Fluency in English and German required.