Lead Software Engineer; P4475, P4477 Cincinnati, OH; Chicago, IL

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.

Join us °!

The AI Enablement team ° is seeking a Lead Software Engineer for its Agentic Foundations team. This team is responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining the agentic backbone of the Kroger enterprise, including platforms, patterns, and tools to support the best practice development of AI agents.

The Lead Software Engineer will provide hands‑on technical leadership across architecture, implementation, and operations of core agentic capabilities, including agent/MCP/scorer/prompt registries, evaluation and monitoring tooling, and low‑code/no‑code agent platforms that abstract complexity for developers and business users. You will partner closely with product management, data science, and engineering peers and leaders to deliver enterprise‑grade capabilities that accelerate time‑to‑value, improve quality and reliability, and promote compliant, best‑practice use of agentic systems.

• Lead the design, development, and operation of core agentic platforms, services, and tooling used across the Kroger enterprise
• Own technical outcomes for a more specific product area, such as registries (agent/MCP/scorer/prompt), evaluation frameworks, observability/monitoring, SDKs/APIs/UIs, and low‑code/no‑code agent platforms
• Provide in‑depth technical leadership to scope and implement scalable, secure, and reliable solutions
• Uphold standards for architecture, code quality, testing, and documentation
• Partner with the Agentic Foundations leadership, as well as engineering and data science leads, to plan quarters/cycles/sprints and ensure efficient, predictable delivery
• Work with offshore reliability engineering teams to ensure SLAs are upheld
• Occasional participation in level 2 on‑call support for production systems
• Abstract complex capabilities into developer‑friendly interfaces (APIs, Python packages, CLIs, and UIs) to reduce friction and accelerate adoption
• Drive operational excellence across platforms, including incident management, on‑call support, capacity planning, and cost optimization
• Mentor and guide engineers through code reviews, architecture discussions, and pairing; contribute to team growth, onboarding, and enablement

• Professional experience with cloud‑based software architecture focused on scalability, performance, and reliability
• Professional experience with end‑to‑end SDLC leveraging CI/CD and AIOps/MLOps, including experience with agentic SDLC tooling
• Professional experience with large‑scale AI/ML systems, including 1+ years with GenAI and deep learning methods
• Professional experience with AI/ML frameworks and tooling (PyTorch, OpenAI SDK, Lang Chain, autogen)
• Professional experience with AIOps/MLOps tooling and concepts (MLflow, Model Registry, Model Monitoring)
• Professional experience with scaling and deploying AI/ML systems using tooling in Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, including CI/CD, containerization, orchestration, and API development (in particular FastAPI)
• Professional experience with Kubernetes (AKS) and Helm
• Professional experience with Python Professional experience in ambiguous environments
• Skilled in problem solving, analytic thinking, and creativity
• Skilled in planning, organization, and verbal/written business communication
• Skilled in maintaining a positive leader persona in ambiguous and changing environments
• Demonstrated excellence as a teammate and leader
• 4‑6 years relevant experience
• Education:
  
  Bachelor’s degree or higher in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Machine…