Director, Software Engineering; P4474

Position: Director, Software Engineering (P4474)
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 !__________________________________________________________DIRECTOR, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (P4474)

SUMMARY:

The AI Enablement team  is seeking a Director of Software Engineering 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 Director of Engineering requires a unique mix of software engineering and AI skills necessary to lead the technical design of platforms, patterns, and tools to support the enterprise agentic ecosystem. This role has a focus on providing the technical leadership needed for engineering and data science development teams implementing solutions like agent/MCP/scorer/prompt registries, agent-related tools to aid in the development and monitoring of best practice agents and tools, and managing low-code and no-code agent platforms that integrate with agentic support.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

Partner with the Director of Product Management for Agentic Foundations to jointly lead the space for the Kroger enterprise

Lead and manage a team of engineers, guiding them in the design and development of their product/platform areas and in the management of their own reports

Lead and manage hiring efforts for engineers on the Agentic Foundations team, including finding interview panelists, writing interview guides and questions, and assisting with coding screening questions

Own and manage offshore reliability engineering teams

Provide in-depth technical leadership in the scoping and implementation of enterprise-grade solutions to support agents across the Kroger enterprise

Provide operational leadership across agentic platforms, ensuring enterprise-grade reliability, observability, and incident management

Maintain an up-to-date expertise on agentic workflows, frameworks, platforms, and best practices to identify and inform new capabilities for implementation

Foster a collaborative and innovative team environment, encouraging professional growth and development among team members

Reduce the development time of the team by leveraging agentic SDLC tooling provided by the enterprise

Lead the abstraction of tooling and services to user-friendly interfaces like APIs, Python packages, or UIsUnderstand business requirements and trade-off scale, risk, and accuracy to maximize value and translate research into consumable products or services

Guide the development teams to follow software development standards, including version control, documentation, testing, and support

Make time-sensitive decisions and solve urgent problems without escalation QUALIFICATIONS, SKILLS, AND

EXPERIENCE:

7+ years professional experience with cloud-based software architecture focused on scalability, performance, and reliability7+ years professional experience with end-to-end SDLC leveraging CI/CD and AIOps/MLOps, including experience with agentic SDLC tooling7+ years professional experience with large-scale AI/ML systems, including 2+ years with GenAI and…