84.51° Overview:

84.51° is a retail data science, insights and media company. We help The Kroger Co., consumer packaged goods companies, agencies, publishers and affiliates create more personalized and valuable experiences for shoppers across the path to purchase.

Powered by cutting-edge science, we utilize first-party retail data from more than 62 million U.S. households sourced through the Kroger Plus loyalty card program to fuel a more customer-centric journey using 84.51° Insights, 84.51° Loyalty Marketing and our retail media advertising solution, Kroger Precision Marketing.

Join us at 84.51°!

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We are seeking a Senior Software Engineer, AI Enablement to join our AI Platform Acceleration team. The AI Platform Acceleration team will enable AI democratization through apps & services and asymmetric growth through embedding AI capabilities across our business. The cross-functional talent will train and deploy foundational models and sciences, establish an AI platform to enable democratization and engaging with third party vendors to enable speed, scale, and efficiency. 

You will play a pivotal role in designing and implementing cutting-edge artificial intelligence solutions. You will collaborate with cross-functional teams of Data Scientists, Research Scientists, Software Engineers, and Product Leads to understand business requirements, identify opportunities for AI integration, and ensure our platforms enable development of scalable and robust AI systems. This role will be responsible for partnering with 84.51° teams to understand business requirements in order to design, test and evolve a strategic prompting strategy to guide AI responses.  The successful candidate will be an innovative, forward thinking technology leader with a relentless focus on customers and inspiring people. They will be a natural networker across roles and teams alike.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Execute the vision, goals, priorities and work alongside the team to accomplish them. Ensure high-quality technical solutions.

• Drive the technical aspects of solutions where needed including proofs of concepts, sizings, designs, implementation and testing.
• Drive continuous improvement to deliver solutions that are at the forefront of industry leading techniques while also adhering to best practices.
• Assist in the design of and implement effective prompts to guide AI responses withing specific parameters.
• Conduct thorough testing and analysis of AI responses to prompts, identifying areas for improvement.
• Iterate on prompt designs based on feedback and performance metrics.
• Document prompt design processes and results for future reference and knowledge sharing.
• Develop and maintain tooling frameworks to establish and enforce best practices for effective prompting in AI-powered solutions.
• Lead the technical vision and strategy for prompt engineering, ensuring innovative and efficient approaches to drive excellence in AI applications.

• Support a culture of learning and development. Promote and enable technical skills development in support of high-quality code components, systems, and solutions.

• Work in partnership with Product and Architecture teams to derive technical requirements from business requirements and identify risk areas.
• Support recruitment and resource plans of the team to hire great development talent; including; recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding/training
• Escalate concerns to leadership, as needed, and remove roadblocks for the team
• An advocate for 84.51 delivery methodology.
• Participate in and contribute to Agile team ceremonies; including: Backlog Reviews, Retrospectives, Architectural Reviews, team and system demos
• Lead and participate in Communities of Practice.
• Work cross functionally to align strategy, methodology and execution

QUALIFICATIONS, SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

• Bachelor’s Degree or higher and relevant certifications in technology and/or project management
• 3+ years of experience working in infrastructure/cloud and/or software development
• 3+ years of experience using advanced algorithms, programming languages, or technologies
• Strong knowledge and skill in cloud computing solutions, technologies, and trends
• Hands-on experience in delivery and support of cloud services in a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture using at least two major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI).
• Extensive, hands-on experience with modern software development concepts such as CI/CD, service-oriented architecture, infrastructure as code, and/or containerization
• Understanding of machine learning and AI principles and development processes
• Strong experience leading and operating in a lean, agile environment with distributed teams.
• Excellent communication skills, particularly on technical topics.
• Comfort with independent learning of new technologies, and willingness to jump into using unfamiliar tools
• High level of independence; ability to make time-sensitive decisions rapidly and solve urgent problems without escalation.
• Strong time and project management skills; the ability to balance multiple, simultaneous work items and prioritize as necessary.
• Demonstrated success in working collaboratively across technology and governance roles to develop, implement, and operate systems that improve processes & efficiencies, and support business strategies.

Desired Characteristics & Technical Skills:

• Experience with Azure, Azure AI Studio, GCP, Vertex AI
• Experience with MLOps/LLMOps patterns and solutions 
• Experience with Databricks, ML Flow
• Experience with GitHub, GitHub Actions, Harness or related tools

Important: We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time for this position. Applicants must be authorized to work for ANY employer in the U.S. 

This is a Hybrid position. Candidates must be able to come into the office on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of each week. We have locations in Cincinnati, OH, Chicago, IL, Deerfield, IL, New York, NY, and Portland, OR.

There are no remote options for this position. 

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