Applied AI Lead Developer

The Senior AI Lead Developer will oversee the design, development, and deployment of production AI applications, guiding a hands-on engineering team at Family Dollar. The role emphasizes agentic AI, retrieval-augmented generation, MLOps, and integration with the enterprise IT estate on Google Cloud Platform. A Bachelor’s degree is required, with a Master’s degree preferred, and candidates should bring about 10 years of relevant experience.

Responsibilities

• Transform business needs into AI solutions that can be delivered quickly and iteratively on Google Cloud Platform.
• Develop agentic AI applications using modern agent development kits and frameworks such as Google Agent Development Kit, Gemini Agent Platform, and LangGraph, including multi-agent workflows, tool integration, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
• Design and operate retrieval augmented generation pipelines that ground LLMs in Family Dollar data, covering data ingestion, embeddings, and vector stores.
• Deploy and maintain production-grade AI agents capable of reasoning, tool-use, and multi-step task execution.
• Establish and maintain MLOps and CI/CD pipelines for AI workloads, including model and prompt versioning, evaluation harnesses, monitoring, cost controls, and rollback procedures.
• Implement enterprise-grade guardrails for AI applications, including prompt-injection defenses, PII handling, content safety, role-based access controls, and audit logging; collaborate with platform, security, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to meet standards for identity, networking, data residency, and compliance.
• Define integration patterns and data contracts to connect AI applications with the existing IT estate, detailing APIs and data exchanges across identity, networking, data, and retail systems (POS, ERP, CRM, inventory, supply chain) in partnership with system-owning teams.
• Own the technical quality across AI initiatives by setting engineering standards, conducting code reviews, and minimizing technical debt to maintain operability and maintainability.
• Collaborate with IT support to transition operations through SOPs, runbooks, dashboards, on-call coverage, and escalation points after handover.
• Lead and mentor the engineering team, promoting knowledge sharing and enforcing technical standards across the AI and Automation functions.
• Provide on-call technical support as needed.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Requirements

• Experience in retail, supply chain, or large-scale operational environments involving retail systems such as POS, ERP, CRM, inventory, and logistics.
• Advanced knowledge of recent GenAI platform developments and capabilities.
• Hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, generative AI, large language models, and agentic frameworks.

Technologies

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