"Candidates must be authorized to work in the United States without the need for current or future visa sponsorship."

The Applied AI Lead Developer is a hands-on “builder” role, and a senior technical staff engineer who can lead a team of developers and can also builds new AI applications and software including agentic AI applications, analytical solutions and pilot new ideas from incubation to deployment. This role is a critical part of Family Dollar’s capability to build our own AI applications inhouse using top of line agent development kits, APIs, software libraries and interface with our vendors and partners to trial their products for fit within Family Dollar’s IT estate, including our cloud environments, digital applications, and our operational systems.

The ideal candidate has 10+ years in IT software engineering with deep proficiency in Python, and hands-on experience building and deploying production AI workloads on Google Cloud Platform and interconnecting multiple applications via robust secure best practices and scalable enterprise frameworks. They are adept with generative AI, large language models, and agentic AI frameworks, and bring a working knowledge of MLOps, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and applied data science. They can lead a team of engineers to take new ideas from incubation through pilot to production, run experiments on their own to validate feasibility, define success metrics, evaluation methodology, and exit criteria at each stage.

Principal Duties & Responsibilities:

• Translate business requirements into target AI solutions that can be delivered fast and iteratively on Google Cloud Platform.
• Develop agentic AI applications using modern agent development kits and frameworks (e.g., Google Agent Development Kit, Gemini Agent Platform, LangGraph, etc), including multi-agent workflows, tool integration, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints.
• Build and operate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solutions that ground LLMs in Family Dollar's enterprise data, including ingestion, embeddings and vectors.
• 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, prompt-injection defense, PII handling, content safety, role-based access controls, and audit logging; partnering with platform, security, infrastructure, and business stakeholders to meet Family Dollar's standards for identity, networking, data residency, and compliance.
• Define how AI applications integrate into Family Dollar's existing IT estate. Set integration patterns, APIs, and data contracts across identity, networking, data, and retail systems (POS, ERP, CRM, inventory, supply chain), partnering with the teams that own those systems.
• Own technical quality across the team's AI work - set and uphold engineering standards, review code, and keep technical debt low so solutions stay maintainable and easy to operate
• Partner with IT support to transition support gradually through SOPs, runbooks, dashboards, on-call coverage, and alerting, and escalation point after handover.
• Lead and mentor the engineering team, sharing knowledge and setting technical standards across the AI and Automation team.
• On call coverage (technical support) as needed.
• Performs other duties as assigned.

Position Requirements:

• Experience in retail, supply chain, or large-scale operational environments within retail systems (POS, ERP, CRM, inventory, supply chain, etc).
• Advanced knowledge of recent GenAI platform advancements.
• Experience in Google Cloud Platform, generative AI, LLMs, and agentic frameworks.

Minimum Requirements:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field (Master’s preferred).
• 10+ years of progressive IT experience in large, cross functional teams or projects, preferably in a retail environment.
• Write clean, well-tested, well-documented code; conduct code reviews; and contribute to internal libraries, templates, and engineering best practices.
• Sense of urgency and the ability to drive a delivery team toward results in a dynamic environment.
• Ability in developing, presenting and communicating technical concepts to varying audiences.

Family Dollar is an equal opportunity employer and committed to recruiting, hiring, training, and promoting qualified people of all backgrounds, and make all employment decisions without regard to any protected status. We are committed to complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities.