Lead Software Engineer (P865)
84.51° Overview:
84.51° is a retail data science, insights and media company. We help The Kroger Co., consumer packaged goods companies, agencies, publishers and affiliates create more personalized and valuable experiences for shoppers across the path to purchase.
Powered by cutting-edge science, we utilize first-party retail data from more than 62 million U.S. households sourced through the Kroger Plus loyalty card program to fuel a more customer-centric journey using 84.51° Insights, 84.51° Loyalty Marketing and our retail media advertising solution, Kroger Precision Marketing.
84.51° follows a 5‑day in‑office work schedule to support collaboration, alignment, and team connection.
Join us at 84.51°!
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Technical Lead Software Engineer, AI Platform and APIs (P865)
Location: Chicago, IL/ Cincinnati OH
As a Technical Lead Software Engineer - AI Platform & APIs, you will be the technical leader for a new AI engineering team responsible for building the services, integrations, and platform capabilities that power AI experiences across 84.51°. You will focus on Python/FastAPI services, Azure-native architectures, and data platforms such as Databricks and Snowflake, enabling data scientists and product teams to bring AI solutions to production safely and at scale.
You will partner closely with a Technical Product Manager, an onsite Tech Lead peer, AI/ML engineers, data engineers, cloud engineers, and front-end teams to design APIs, orchestration patterns, and observability that make it easy to deliver AI-driven features into customer-facing products.
Responsibilities
Hands-on engineering
- Lead by example with high-quality code in Python and related backend technologies, setting standards for testing, observability, and performance.
- Build and maintainFastAPI services, background workers, and integration components that connect AI models and data pipelines to downstream applications.
- Work with data engineers to design efficient data access and transformation patterns between Databricks, Snowflake, and AI services.
- Collaborate with front end engineers (React) to ensure APIs are ergonomic, well-documented, andoptimized for UX and performance.
Technical leadership
- Leadthe technical direction for AI-enabling services and platforms, with a primary focus on Python/FastAPI and Azure.
- Design and evolve API contracts (OAS 3.0) that expose AI/ML capabilities such as retrieval, scoring, ranking, and agentic workflows to multiple product teams.
- Work with Tech Lead definingreference architectures and patterns for integrating models, data, and orchestration with our AI platform (e.g., Databricks, Snowflake, model registries, feature/embedding stores).
- Drive decisions around scalability, resiliency, and security ensuring thesolutions are production-ready and cloud-native.
AI/ML integration & operations
- Partner with data scientists and AI/ML engineers to move models from experimentation into robust, observable production services.
- Define deployment patterns (batch vs real-time), model integration approaches, and evaluation hooks that support continuous improvement of AI systems.
- Implement observability for AI services using Datadog (metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerts) and drive SLOs for latency, reliability, and correctness.
- Contribute to AIOps/MLOps practices such as CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, canary/blue-green deployments, and rollback strategies for AI-powered features.
Team leadership & collaboration
- Provide day-to-day technical guidance and coaching for a distributed team of engineers (AI/ML, data, cloud, software), including offshore collaborators.
- Collaborate with the Technical Product Manager to refine roadmap, backlog, and success metrics, balancing delivery with architectural runway and technical debt.
- Help shape and enforce engineering standards across the team: code review practices, design documentation, runbooks, and incident response.
- Model strong partnership behaviors with product, data science, and business stakeholders, translating platform capabilities into clear value for end users.
Ways of working
- Lead and participate in Scrum ceremonies (backlog refinement, sprint planning, reviews, retrospectives) to drive predictable, high-quality delivery.
- Ensure that work is decomposed into incremental, testable slices and that the team maintains a healthy balance of feature work, reliability, and platform investment.
- Foster a culture of learning, experimentation, and continuous improvement, with particular focus on emerging AI and platform engineering practices.
Qualifications
- 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years in a senior or lead capacity.
- Strong back-end engineering expertise with Python and modern API frameworks (FastAPI preferred, or equivalent experience with Flask/Django and willingness to adopt FastAPI).
- Demonstrated experience designing, building, and operating cloud-native services on a major cloud provider; Azure experience strongly preferred.
- Hands-on experience integrating machine learning or AI systems into production (e.g., model endpoints, scoring APIs, feature/embedding stores, recommendation/ranking services).
- Solid understanding of data platforms and pipelines, including practical experience working with tools like Databricks, Snowflake, or similar technologies.
- Experience with observability and operational tooling (Datadog or similar) and familiarity with defining/monitoring SLOs and handling incident response.
- Proven track record leading or mentoring engineers, influencing architecture, and raising the bar on engineering practices in a cross-functional environment.
Major bonus points
- Exposure to front end technologies such as React, and experience collaborating closely with UI teams to design API contracts and integration patterns.
- Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes/AKS) and infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform, Bicep, or similar).
- Background in platform engineering, internal developer platforms, or building shared services used by multiple product teams.
- Familiarity with GenAI, LLMs, agent frameworks, or retrieval-augmented generation patterns in production systems.
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Pay Transparency and Benefits
- The stated salary range represents the entire span applicable across all geographic markets from lowest to highest. Actual salary offers will be determined by multiple factors including but not limited to geographic location, relevant experience, knowledge, skills, other job-related qualifications, and alignment with market data and cost of labor. In addition to salary, this position is also eligible for variable compensation.
- Below is a list of some of the benefits we offer our associates:
- Health: Medical: with competitive plan designs and support for self-care, wellness and mental health. Dental: with in-network and out-of-network benefit. Vision: with in-network and out-of-network benefit.
- Wealth: 401(k) with Roth option and matching contribution. Health Savings Account with matching contribution (requires participation in qualifying medical plan). AD&D and supplemental insurance options to help ensure additional protection for you.
- Happiness: Paid time off with flexibility to meet your life needs, including 5 weeks of vacation time, 7 health and wellness days, 3 floating holidays, as well as 6 company-paid holidays per year. Paid leave for maternity, paternity and family care instances.
Pay Range
$121,000 - $201,250 USD
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