AI Developer

This on-site AI Developer role in Chesapeake, VA, focuses on building production AI workloads on Google Cloud Platform, including agentic AI, MLOps pipelines, and vendor integrations, from incubation through deployment. The position emphasizes developing in-house AI capabilities with guardrails, experimentation, and mentoring for junior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy production AI applications on Google Cloud Platform, applying machine learning and generative AI techniques to solutions across merchandising, supply chain, store operations, finance, and customer experience.
• Develop agentic AI applications using modern agent development kits and frameworks, including multi-agent workflows, tool integration, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
• Construct and operate retrieval-augmented generation solutions that ground large language models in Family Dollar data, covering ingestion, embeddings, vector and hybrid search, reranking, and evaluation.
• Establish and maintain MLOps pipelines for AI workloads, including CI/CD, model and prompt versioning, evaluation harnesses, monitoring, cost controls, and rollback procedures.
• Implement enterprise-grade guardrails for AI applications, including prompt injection defense, PII handling, content safety, role-based access controls, and audit logging, collaborating with platform, security, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to meet standards on identity, networking, data residency, and compliance.
• Evaluate vendor and partner AI products for suitability within Family Dollar's IT environment; develop proofs of concept, conduct technical bake-offs, and deliver clear recommendations.
• Execute experiments to assess emerging AI capabilities and determine internal product-market fit.
• Deploy and maintain production-grade AI agents capable of reasoning, tool-use, and multi-step task execution.
• Manage the full lifecycle of code, from initial prompt engineering and fine-tuning to CI/CD and real-time monitoring of agent performance.
• Mentor junior engineers and share knowledge across the AI and Automation team.
• Collaborate with IT support teams to co-own AI application support, including on-call coverage, while transitioning ownership through SOPs, runbooks, and helpdesk documentation.
• Performs other duties as assigned.

Requirements

• Authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future visa sponsorship.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field; Master’s degree is preferred.
• 8+ years of progressive IT experience in large, cross-functional teams or projects, preferably within a retail environment.
• Proficient in writing clean, well-tested Python code, participating in code reviews, and contributing to internal libraries, templates, and engineering best practices.
• Ability to develop, present, and communicate technical concepts to varied audiences.
• Demonstrates urgency and the ability to motivate a team in a dynamic environment.
• Experience in retail, supply chain, or large-scale operational environments within retail systems (POS, ERP, CRM, inventory, supply chain, etc).
• Advanced knowledge of recent GenAI platform advancements from leading providers and hyperscalers.
• Experience with responsible AI practices, model governance, and frameworks for evaluating LLM safety and accuracy.
• Contributions to open-source AI projects or relevant publications.

Technologies

• Python
• Google Cloud Platform
• Google Agent Development Kit
• Gemini Agent Platform
• LangGraph