AI Engineer Manager / AI Development Manager

Job Description

Job Description

AI Engineer Manager / AI Development Manager

Serving the needs of all families with young children, Carter's Inc. is the largest North American apparel retailer exclusively for babies and young children, encompassing Carter's, OshKosh B'gosh, Skip*Hop and Little Planet brands. Meaningful work, constant learning, genuine people, and a community guided by core values that promote inclusion and innovation is in everything we do. There are many reasons to build your career at Carter's.

HOW YOU'LL MAKE AN IMPACT:

Carter's is standing up an enterprise AI Center of Excellence (CoE) to bring safe, governed, and high-value AI to every part of the business. As Manager, AI Development, you will be the player-coach who leads the CoE's build team - managing and mentoring our AI developers, consulting on solution design, and staying hands-on in the code. You will translate prioritized use cases into shipped, supported AI solutions (agentic workflows, connectors, automations, and reporting tools) while raising the technical bar of the team and the reusable patterns the whole enterprise builds on. You will partner closely with the Tech & Platform Lead on architecture and with the Solutions Manager on delivery commitments.

Delivery Leadership & Team Management (40%)

• Manage the AI CoE development team (Junior/Mid AI Developers and intern developers): assignments, priorities, performance, and career growth
• Own sprint planning and delivery execution for the CoE build backlog, in partnership with the Solutions Manager's intake and prioritization
• Run code and design reviews; unblock developers and manage delivery risks and dependencies
• Coordinate with Forward-Deployed Engineers so embedded builds follow CoE standards and hand back cleanly
• Report delivery status, capacity, and velocity to CoE leadership

Hands-On Development & Technical Consulting (35%)

• Personally design and build the most complex or highest-stakes AI solutions (agentic workflows, LLM applications, skills, and connector-based automations)
• Consult with business units and FDEs on solution feasibility, approach, and effort - turning ambiguous asks into buildable designs
• Prototype new patterns (e.g., natural-language query over governed data, document generation, incident summarization) and harden successful pilots into production solutions
• Serve as escalation point for technical issues across CoE-supported solutions

Standards, Quality & Enablement (25%)

• Define and enforce development standards: coding practices, testing, documentation, versioning, and release management for AI solutions
• Curate the CoE pattern library of reusable, governed building blocks for business super users and champions
• Partner with the AI Security & Governance Manager so every building pass security review efficiently (access controls, data flows, prompt-injection safeguards)
• Mentor super developers in business units; support office hours and paired builds that move prototypes into supported solutions

WE'D LOVE TO HEAR FROM YOU IF:

Must have:

• At least 7+ years of software and/or data analytics development experience,
• At least 2+ years leading or managing developers including 1+ years building Generative AI (GenAI)/large language models (LLMs)-based solutions
• Hands-on AI development - practical experience shipping LLM applications, agentic workflows, or AI-powered automations against enterprise systems and APIs
• Proven experience with enterprise AI platforms and frameworks (e.g., Claude/Anthropic API, Azure OpenAI, MCP-style tool integrations, RAG architectures)
• Experience in leading sprint planning, backlog grooming, and prioritization processes, collaborating with stakeholders to deliver critical features and meet strategic goals.
• Communication - excels at partnering with non-technical stakeholders, clarifying ambiguous needs, facilitating productive discussions, and guiding developers with clear, constructive, and empathetic feedback.
• Delivery leadership - track record running agile delivery: backlog management, code review discipline, and predictable releases
• Integration fluency - comfort working with enterprise data and platform integrations (e.g., BI tools, cloud data warehouses, collaboration and ticketing systems)
• At least a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, and/or related field, or equivalent practical experience
• undefined

Preferred skills and experience

• Familiarity with MLOps/LLMOps practices: evaluation, monitoring, versioning, and cost management
• Retail or consumer-products industry experience
• Building out cross-functional teams along with team development

Carters is committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, veteran status, or any other status protected by federal, state, or local law.