Director of AI Acceleration & Platform Architecture

We are seeking an Architect/Director for AI Acceleration 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.

This is a hands-on position - roughly 40% architecture, 40% coding, and 20% administrative. 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 lead all strategic, tactical, and operational aspects of building solutions to support the 84.51° AI Acceleration strategy. 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:

• Architect end-to-end AI solutions, considering business objectives, data availability, and technical constraints. Understand current 84.51° architecture landscape to assess fit and gaps for bleeding edge AI acceleration work.
• Partner with Data Scientists, Engineers, and Product talent to ensure our platform strategy delivers against requirements, scope, and system deployment need.
• Employ solid change management, performance measurement, automation, and well thought out solution implementation methodologies to ensure AI Acceleration platform architecture is stable and reliable.
• Implement industry best practices, acquired from your background or through monitoring of industry standards for your horizontal team and function to improve current processes.
• Represent the AI Acceleration team in the formulation, influence, and implementation of company business system architecture plans, assessing cost and feasibility of system requests, and ensuring the plan supports both strategic and near-term needs.
• Create comprehensive documentation for AI architectures, models, and processes.
• Leverage a servant leadership approach in the recruiting, motivating, mentoring, and growing world-class teams and creating followership that as a leader, teams want to work with.
• Communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical colleagues at all levels in both verbal and written communications and preparing and presenting strategic visions and presentations to executive leadership team.
• Build relationships with key partners within the Kroger Technology organization to share best practices, help accelerate the growth of both organizations, and deliver joint initiatives as appropriate.

Qualifications, Skills, and Experience:

• Bachelor’s Degree or higher and relevant certifications in technology and/or project management
• 7+ years of experience working in infrastructure/cloud and/or software development
• 7+ years of experience using advanced algorithms, programming languages, or technologies
• 4+ years of experience in tech consulting, retail, or related professional services preferred
• 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
• Experience with and 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.

Skills related to AIOPS/LLMOPS

• 1-2 years of experience in the operational aspects (LLMOPS) of LLMs/and or any Transformer based models, focusing on efficient training, deployment, and scalability using GPU/TPU clusters and managing distributed infrastructure for Model Serving.
• 2-3 years of experience in designing and operating scalable Stateful Services, such as chatbots with persistent context, leveraging LLMOPS and Full stack App design.
• Knowledge in architecting for AI Safety, such as adversarial testing, Sandboxing, Red teaming, AI firewalls, content filtering and other responsible AI safety tooling.
• 1-2 years of experience in architecting RAG patterns and deep understanding of various vector databases, and hybrid data stores.
• Ability to independently evaluate vendors for tools that are related to AIOPS