Director, Software Engineering – Agentic Foundations (P4474)

PREFERRED LOCATION: Cincinnati / Chicago

SUMMARY:

The AI Enablement team at 84.51° is seeking a Director of Software Engineering for its Agentic Foundations team. This team is responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining the agentic backbone of the Kroger enterprise, including platforms, patterns, and tools to support the best practice development of AI agents.

The Director of Engineering requires a unique mix of software engineering and AI skills necessary to lead the technical design of platforms, patterns, and tools to support the enterprise agentic ecosystem. This role has a focus on providing the technical leadership needed for engineering and data science development teams implementing solutions like agent/MCP/scorer/prompt registries, agent-related tools to aid in the development and monitoring of best practice agents and tools, and managing low-code and no-code agent platforms that integrate with agentic support.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Partner with the Director of Product Management for Agentic Foundations to jointly lead the space for the Kroger enterprise
• Lead and manage a team of engineers, guiding them in the design and development of their product/platform areas and in the management of their own reports
• Lead and manage hiring efforts for engineers on the Agentic Foundations team, including finding interview panelists, writing interview guides and questions, and assisting with coding screening questions
• Own and manage offshore reliability engineering teams
• Provide in-depth technical leadership in the scoping and implementation of enterprise-grade solutions to support agents across the Kroger enterprise
• Provide operational leadership across agentic platforms, ensuring enterprise-grade reliability, observability, and incident management
• Maintain an up-to-date expertise on agentic workflows, frameworks, platforms, and best practices to identify and inform new capabilities for implementation
• Foster a collaborative and innovative team environment, encouraging professional growth and development among team members
• Reduce the development time of the team by leveraging agentic SDLC tooling provided by the enterprise
• Lead the abstraction of tooling and services to user-friendly interfaces like APIs, Python packages, or UIs
• Understand business requirements and trade-off scale, risk, and accuracy to maximize value and translate research into consumable products or services
• Guide the development teams to follow software development standards, including version control, documentation, testing, and support
• Make time-sensitive decisions and solve urgent problems without escalation

QUALIFICATIONS, SKILLS, AND EXPERIENCE:

• 7+ years professional experience with cloud-based software architecture focused on scalability, performance, and reliability
• 7+ years professional experience with end-to-end SDLC leveraging CI/CD and AIOps/MLOps, including experience with agentic SDLC tooling
• 7+ years professional experience with large-scale AI/ML systems, including 2+ years with GenAI and deep learning methods
• Professional experience with production-grade agentic systems, including concepts like design and development, evals, deployment, and monitoring
• Professional experience with AI/ML frameworks and tooling (PyTorch, OpenAI SDK, LangChain, autogen)
• Professional experience with AIOps/MLOps tooling and concepts (MLflow, Model Registry, Model Monitoring)
• Professional experience with scaling and deploying AI/ML systems using tooling in Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, including CI/CD, containerization, orchestration, and API development (in particular FastAPI)
• Professional experience with Kubernetes (AKS) and Helm
• Professional experience with Python
• Professional experience with infrastructure-as-code using Terraform
• Professional experience leading technical teams and consulting with customers, including managing senior engineers, communicating complex technical topics, and driving outcomes in ambiguous environments
• Skilled in partnering with product management peers to jointly define product and team direction and priorities
• Education: Bachelor’s degree or higher in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field

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Lead Software Engineer – Agentic Foundations (P4475, P4477)

LOCATION: Cincinnati / Chicago

SUMMARY:

The AI Enablement team at 84.51° is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for its Agentic Foundations team. This team is responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining the agentic backbone of the Kroger enterprise, including platforms, patterns, and tools to support the best practice development of AI agents.

The Lead Software Engineer will provide hands-on technical leadership across architecture, implementation, and operations of core agentic capabilities, including agent/MCP/scorer/prompt registries, evaluation and monitoring tooling, and low-code/no-code agent platforms that abstract complexity for developers and business users. You will partner closely with product management, data science, and engineering peers and leaders to deliver enterprise-grade capabilities that accelerate time-to-value, improve quality and reliability, and promote compliant, best-practice use of agentic systems.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Lead the design, development, and operation of core agentic platforms, services, and tooling used across the Kroger enterprise
• Own technical outcomes for a more specific product area, such as registries (agent/MCP/scorer/prompt), evaluation frameworks, observability/monitoring, SDKs/APIs/UIs, and low-code/no-code agent platforms
• Provide in-depth technical leadership to scope and implement scalable, secure, and reliable solutions;
• Uphold standards for architecture, code quality, testing, and documentation
• Partner with the Agentic Foundations leadership, as well as engineering and data science leads, to plan quarters/cycles/sprints and ensure efficient, predictable delivery
• Work with offshore reliability engineering teams to ensure SLAs are upheld
• Occasional participation in level 2 on-call support for production systems
• Abstract complex capabilities into developer-friendly interfaces (APIs, Python packages, CLIs, and UIs) to reduce friction and accelerate adoption
• Drive operational excellence across platforms, including incident management, on-call support, capacity planning, and cost optimization
• Mentor and guide engineers through code reviews, architecture discussions, and pairing; contribute to team growth, onboarding, and enablement

QUALIFICATIONS, SKILLS, AND EXPERIENCE:

• Professional experience with cloud-based software architecture focused on scalability, performance, and reliability
• Professional experience with end-to-end SDLC leveraging CI/CD and AIOps/MLOps, including experience with agentic SDLC tooling
• Professional experience with large-scale AI/ML systems, including 1+ years with GenAI and deep learning methods
• Professional experience with AI/ML frameworks and tooling (PyTorch, OpenAI SDK, LangChain, autogen)
• Professional experience with AIOps/MLOps tooling and concepts (MLflow, Model Registry, Model Monitoring)
• Professional experience with scaling and deploying AI/ML systems using tooling in Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, including CI/CD, containerization, orchestration, and API development (in particular FastAPI)
• Professional experience with Kubernetes (AKS) and Helm
• Professional experience with Python
• Professional experience in ambiguous environments
• Skilled in problem solving, analytic thinking, and creativity
• Skilled in planning, organization, and verbal/written business communication
• Skilled in maintaining a positive leader persona in ambiguous and changing environments
• Demonstrated excellence as a teammate and leader
• 4-6 years relevant experience
• Education: Bachelor’s degree or higher in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field

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Lead Technical Product Manager – Agent Platform 

LOCATION: Cincinnati / Chicago (P4476) 

SUMMARY:  

The AI Enablement team at 84.51° is seeking a Lead Product Manager for its Agent Platform team. This team is responsible for architecting, implementing, maintaining, and supporting the use of the agentic foundation of the Kroger enterprise. 

The Lead Product Manager will discover, prioritize, plan the implementation of the agent platform – this could include: a control layer consisting of agent, MCP, eval, and prompt registries; evaluation and monitoring tools; and pro-code, low-code, and no-code development capabilities. The role will partner closely with engineering and data science leads to shape the roadmap, translate business and technical needs into clear requirements, and ensure the delivery of high-value, enterprise-grade capabilities that reduce time-to-value, improve quality and reliability, and promote safe, compliant use of agentic systems. 
 

RESPONSIBILITIES: 

• Own product discovery and roadmap for the managed agent platform 
• Maintain a current roadmap and communicate trade-offs, dependencies, and timelines to stakeholders and delivery teams 

• Translate business goals, user needs, and technical constraints into product requirements and acceptance criteria with a clear definition of done 

• Partner with the Agentic Foundations leadership, as well as engineering and data science leads, to plan quarters/cycles/sprints and ensure efficient, predictable delivery 

• Define and evolve core agentic platform capabilities, including: 

• Registries (agent/MCP/scorer/prompt), templates, and pattern libraries 

• Agent development and monitoring tools, including evaluation frameworks and observability 

• Integration with data and API layers and pro-code agent frameworks 

• Integration with enterprise AIOps/MLOps, CI/CD, and governance workflows 

• Facilitate user research and testing to understand developer and business user workflows; validate usability, safety, reliability, and performance 

• Analyze product usage and operational data to inform prioritization, measure value, and guide iteration 

• Drive adoption across customer teams through documentation, enablement, demos, and feedback loops; remove friction points and champion best practice 

• Ensure alignment with enterprise strategies for scale, reliability, safety, compliance, and cost-efficiency 

• Manage progress toward objectives; proactively surface risks, blocks, and cross-team dependencies; coordinate mitigation plans 

• Develop strong internal and external stakeholder relationships; influence and drive change in ambiguous, evolving environments 

• Communicate realized value and outcomes, including usage, adoption, productivity improvements, and risk reduction 

QUALIFICATIONS, SKILLS, AND EXPERIENCE:  

• Professional experience in leading enterprise AI, ML, or data platforms 

• Professional experience in a product/software development team  

• Professional experience in managing technical and business stakeholders  

• Professional experience in ambiguous environments  

• Skilled in a general technical acumen, able to efficiently converse with software engineers and AI engineers and understand their development processes  

• Skilled in managing cross-functional technical development teams in an agile environment  

• Skilled in managing business priorities against design/user needs while delivering against product roadmaps  

• Skilled in managing end-to-end software product development  

• Skilled in problem solving, analytic thinking, and creativity  

• Skilled in planning, organization, and verbal/written business communication  

• Skilled in maintaining a positive leader persona in ambiguous and changing environments  

• Skilled in quickly flexing between technical and business stakeholder conversations, adapting to a variety of audiences  

• Demonstrated excellence as a teammate and leader  

• 4-6 years relevant experience  

• Education: Bachelor’s degree or higher in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Machine Learning, or a related field 

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Sr. ML Data Engineer, Relevancy Sciences – Personalization & Loyalty Strategy (P508)

The Relevancy Sciences Team is responsible for creating relevant and personalized customer experiences for Kroger's E-commerce platform, which ranks among the top 10 ecommerce companies in the US. We generate trillions of recommendations at scale and deliver them to millions of Kroger customers daily. Our team maintains a comprehensive portfolio of machine learning solutions for search & product recommendations. We are seeking a talented and experienced Senior ML Data Engineer to join our data science team, with specialized expertise in building search and recommender systems.

Role Overview

You will architect, build, and operate the critical data infrastructure that powers our machine learning models, spanning from feature engineering to training data generation. This role serves as the bridge between ML requirements and production data systems, with ownership of feature stores, training/evaluation pipelines, and ML-specific data operations. You will enable data scientists to iterate rapidly while ensuring production-grade reliability and scalability.

What You'll Do

1. Feature Store Operations & Governance (40%)

• Own the feature request lifecycle from intake through deployment, driving reusability and maintaining a searchable feature catalog
• Design and build scalable feature pipelines that compute features from diverse sources (BigQuery, Azure Data Lake) and write to Feature Store infrastructure (Vertex AI Feature Store + BigQuery)
• Build streaming feature engineering pipelines using Apache Beam/Dataflow for real time feature computation and low-latency model serving with sub-second data freshness
• Ensure point-in-time correctness and online/offline feature consistency to prevent data leakage
• Implement drift detection, data quality monitoring, and alerting mechanisms
• Develop self-service tools and templates that enable teams to independently create features

1. Training & Evaluation Data Pipelines (30%)

• Build automated pipelines that generate ML-ready training datasets by combining features with labeled target variables
• Implement point-in-time correctness logic and sophisticated sampling strategies to ensure balanced, representative datasets
• Maintain comprehensive dataset versioning for full traceability across model versions
• Generate detailed evaluation reports with performance metrics segmented by business dimensions
• Support operations across both Azure and Vertex AI environments during platform migration

1. ML Data Operations & Reliability (20%)

• Serve as Tier 2/3 on-call responder for feature data quality incidents, diagnosing and resolving pipeline failures and performance issues
• Maintain comprehensive lineage tracking and metadata management for full data traceability
• Support regulatory compliance through proper data governance and documentation

1. Standards, Education & Collaboration (10%)

• Establish and enforce feature naming conventions, data quality thresholds, and point-in-time correctness patterns
• Conduct workshops on feature engineering best practices and provide expert guidance on feature design
• Partner with Data Scientists, ML Engineers, Data Engineering, and MLOps teams to optimize infrastructure and align with technical strategy

What We're Looking For

Required Qualifications:

• 3+ years of hands-on experience building and maintaining ML data pipelines in production environments with demonstrated expertise in scaling and reliability
• Expert-level SQL skills and advanced Python programming capabilities with experience in data processing frameworks and ML libraries
• Proven experience with cloud data platforms, with strong preference for GCP ecosystem including BigQuery, Dataflow, Vertex AI Feature Store, and associated ML services
• Deep understanding of end-to-end ML workflows including training data preparation, model evaluation methodologies, and serving infrastructure requirements
• Production operations mindset with experience in monitoring, alerting, on-call responsibilities, and meeting SLA commitments

Strongly Preferred Qualifications:

• Hands-on experience with Feature Store platforms such as Vertex AI Feature Store, Feast, Tecton, or similar enterprise solutions
• Deep knowledge of point-in-time correctness principles, temporal joins, and time-series data modeling best practices
• Multi-cloud experience with both Azure and GCP platforms, including data migration and hybrid cloud architectures
• Strong familiarity with core ML concepts including feature engineering, label creation, train/test/validation splits, and data leakage prevention
• Background spanning both analytics engineering and ML-specific data engineering with understanding of the unique requirements of each domain

Success Indicators:

• Improved Data Science Productivity:Data Scientists spend significantly less time on data preparation and infrastructure concerns, enabling more focus on model development and experimentation
• Increased Feature Reuse:Measurable increase in feature reuse across multiple models and teams, reducing redundant development effort and improving consistency
• Reliable Automation:Training and evaluation data generation processes operate reliably with minimal manual intervention and high uptime
• Efficient Incident Response:Data quality incidents are triaged quickly with clear escalation paths and rapid resolution times
• Accelerated ML Iteration:Overall ML model development and iteration velocity improves measurably across all teams using the platform

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