[Hiring] Senior Engineer, AI & Automation @Foot Locker

Role Description

Foot Locker is seeking an experienced and innovative Sr. Engineer, AI & Automation to design, develop, and deliver scalable AI, Generative AI, Agentic AI, and intelligent automation solutions across the retail enterprise. This role will provide hands-on technical leadership in building AI agents, RAG solutions, automation workflows, APIs, and enterprise integrations using modern cloud and data platforms. The position will partner with architects, engineering teams, and business stakeholders to productionize secure, reliable, and governed AI solutions that improve:

• Merchandising
• Inventory
• Supply chain
• Store operations
• Digital commerce
• Customer experience
• Enterprise analytics

This individual will provide deep technical leadership, establish enterprise AI governance frameworks, and drive innovation by transforming business processes into AI-enabled products and experiences. AI products delivered by this team are used every day by store, merchandising, supply chain, digital commerce, and corporate teams across Foot Locker’s brands and digital channels.

Scope of the role: owns AI products and services end to end in production, including their evaluation, reliability, and cost profile, and sets implementation patterns for the team.

Responsibilities

• Design and develop production-grade GenAI, Agentic AI, RAG, and automation solutions.
• Build AI agents and multi-agent workflows integrating enterprise data, APIs, applications, and business processes.
• Develop RAG solutions using LLMs, embeddings, vector search, semantic retrieval, ontology and knowledge graph sources, and enterprise knowledge repositories.
• Integrate AI solutions with platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, Azure, Power BI, APIs, and retail operational systems.
• Build AI-enabled solutions for retail use cases including inventory intelligence, merchandising, supply chain, store operations, product insights, customer analytics, and business reporting.
• Develop reusable AI services, APIs, frameworks, connectors, and automation components.
• Implement LLMOps and CI/CD processes for automated testing, deployment, monitoring, prompt and model version management, and evaluation against groundedness, retrieval quality, task success, latency, and cost per task.
• Implement AI guardrails, security, RBAC, PII protection, Responsible AI, logging, monitoring, and observability.
• Optimize AI solutions for performance, scalability, reliability, token consumption, and cost.
• Troubleshoot complex production issues and continuously improve AI platform capabilities.
• Conduct technical reviews and mentor engineers on AI engineering and software development best practices.
• Collaborate with architects to convert enterprise AI architecture and standards into production implementations.

Qualifications

• 4-7+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, applied AI engineering, automation, or related areas, with hands-on experience delivering AI solutions in production.
• Strong experience with Python, SQL, REST APIs, JSON, and software engineering practices.
• Hands-on knowledge of LLMs, GenAI, RAG, Agentic AI, embeddings, vector databases/search, and prompt engineering.
• Experience with frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, Semantic Kernel, or equivalent agent/orchestration frameworks.
• Experience with Azure OpenAI/OpenAI APIs or comparable enterprise LLM platforms.
• Experience with Snowflake and/or Databricks and modern cloud data architectures.
• Knowledge of Docker, Kubernetes, Git, CI/CD, Azure DevOps/GitHub, and Terraform.
• Understanding of LLMOps, evaluation frameworks, AI observability, security, and Responsible AI.
• Strong troubleshooting, problem-solving, technical leadership, and communication skills.
• Experience in Retail, Digital Commerce, Supply Chain, or Customer Analytics domains preferred.
• Experience working in Agile product delivery environments preferred.
• Azure AI Engineer, Azure Solutions Architect, or equivalent certifications preferred.

Benefits

• Employee Discount
• Paid Time Off
• Medical | Dental | Vision Coverage
• 401(k) | Roth 401(k)
• Life Insurance
• Flexible Spending Account
• Opportunities for Advancement
• Tuition Reimbursement for Qualified Courses
• Strong Company Culture
• Employee Resource Groups