Lead Software Engineer, AI; P4577 ; 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.

84.51° follows a 5‑day in‑office work schedule to support collaboration, alignment, and team connection.

Join us °!

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We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to join ourAISoftware Development Lifecycle (SDLC) teamand build the engineering backbone that scales AI-assisted development across 84.51° and Kroger. As AI workforce tooling matures and adoption grows from pilot teams to dozens of delivery teams, this role provides the systems and patterns that keep pace: deployment automation, standardized templates, and a prompt and skill marketplace that makes best practices discoverable and reusable s team is charged with re‑inventing Software Developer for 84.51º and Kroger with AI at the forefront.

This role provides an opportunity to shape how thousands of developers adopt AI within a large enterprise.

Success means turning repeatable friction into platform infrastructure: authoring workflows, creating templates, and contributing plugins to internal marketplaces to shorten onramps and increase AI‑assisted development velocity. This role spans the spectrum from hands‑on automation engineering to cross‑team enablement and requires someone who can both build systems and communicate their value across technical and non‑technical audiences.

This is a platform-focused, hands‑on engineering role.

You will be expected to both provide technical leadership and produce production‑quality code,operating across Dev Ops, Developer Experience, and AI Enablement domains.

Design and build deployment automation for AI workforce tooling — including

Agentic Harness configurations, MCP serveror similar service‑level integrations, and related CI/CD pipelines

Define and enforce standards for AI tooling configuration, security posture, and observability across teams – often via direct enhancements to the coding harness hook and plugin layers

Ensureaccurateobservability of AI tooling adoption and usage patterns using Datadog, Dynatrace, or related tools

Own and evolve the internal prompt and skill marketplace — enabling teams to publish, discover, version, and reuse prompts, skills, and MCP tools across the enterprise

Develop workflow playbooks that codify AI‑SDLC integration patterns for consistent, repeatable adoption across engineering teams

Work directly with delivery teams to embed AI tooling into their development workflows, translating friction and capability gaps into scalable platform improvements

Regularly document and present learnings from platform work and team engagements to the broader AI Enablement organization

Engage with technology, infrastructure, and product teams as necessary to integrate and extend AI workforce tooling

Participate routinely in team on‑call rotation and customer support during business hours

4-year degree in a technology related discipline (Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Systems, etc.) or equivalent work experience

Minimum 5+ years of experience producing high-quality software on Agile development teams (Python preferred)

5+ years of experience with public cloud technologies (Azure preferred)

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