Applied AI Lead Developer

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

This position is for full-time, onsite employment at the Family Dollar Chesapeake, VA Store Support Center.

We handle relocation for anyone interested outside of the Hampton Roads, VA area

The 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.

** This position is fully onsite.

• 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, Lang Graph, 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:

• Fully onsite office work environment

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related field (Master’s preferred).
• 5+ years of progressive IT experience in large, cross-functional teams or projects, preferably in a retail environment.
• 2+ years developing AI solutions in a leading role
• 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
• Experience in retail, supply chain, or large-scale…