Data Engineer

Summary

The Staff Data Engineer, MLOps leads the design, build, and optimization of Hershey’s machine learning operations platform—enabling data science and AI teams to develop, deploy, monitor, and govern ML models at enterprise scale. The role owns the infrastructure, tooling, and automation that move models from experimentation to production with speed and confidence, building Hershey’s MLOps capability from the ground up and defining engineering standards.

Hershey is building an AI‑driven enterprise platform that transforms how we compete across retail, supply chain, and commercial. We are establishing a unified MLOps foundation on Azure and Databricks that powers demand forecasting models, real‑time pricing and promotion optimization engines, computer vision and quality‑detection models on manufacturing lines, and next‑generation consumer analytics that personalize our reach to millions of households.

• Design and maintain the end‑to‑end MLOps platform on Azure and Databricks, including model training infrastructure, feature stores, experiment tracking, model registries, and serving endpoints.
• Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines for automated model training, validation, packaging, and deployment across environments.
• Implement model serving patterns (batch, real‑time, edge) with blue‑green and canary deployment strategies for safe rollouts; build monitoring frameworks for data drift, concept drift, and prediction quality; automate alerting and retraining triggers.
• Enforce ML governance: model versioning, experiment lineage, artifact management, approval workflows, and audit trails; embed responsible AI practices including explainability tooling, bias detection, and documentation standards.
• Author IaC (Terraform/Bicep) for Azure ML work spaces, Databricks clusters, networking, and compute; optimize costs through autoscaling, spot instances, and GPU scheduling.
• Partner with Data Scientists to product ionize models; develop self‑service templates and documentation for platform onboarding; mentor junior engineers.

• MLOps & ML Engineering:
  Experience taking ML models from experimentation to production, including training automation, model packaging, deployment, and monitoring. Our environment uses MLflow, Databricks Model Serving, and Azure Machine Learning.
• Cloud & Platforms:
  Strong hands‑on experience with Azure Cloud and Databricks; familiarity with Azure ML, AKS, Azure Dev Ops, Data Factory, Unity Catalog, Workflows, and Model Registry.
• Programming & Development:
  Strong Python and SQL; experience with ML frameworks (PyTorch, Scikit‑learn, XGBoost); comfort building APIs and writing modular, testable code.
• Collaboration & Communication:
  Proven ability to partner across Data Science, Architecture, and business teams; experience mentoring engineers and driving technical standards.

• CI/CD & IaC: ML‑specific CI/CD pipelines (Azure Dev Ops, Git Hub Actions);
  Terraform or Bicep for infrastructure provisioning.
• Containerization & Orchestration:
  Experience with Docker and Kubernetes for model serving and workload management.
• Monitoring & Observability:
  Drift detection, prediction quality tracking, and observability tooling (Evidently AI, Azure Monitor, Grafana).

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field;
Master’s preferred.

• 5–10 years in software, ML, data platform, or infrastructure engineering with 3+ years building or operating ML pipelines, model serving infrastructure, or ML platform tooling.
• Hands‑on experience with Azure and Databricks in a production ML context.

The Hershey Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer. The policy of The Hershey Company is to extend opportunities to qualified applicants and employees on an equal basis regardless of an individual's race, color, gender, age, national origin, religion, citizenship status, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, transgender status, physical or mental disability, protected veteran status, genetic information, pregnancy, or any other categories protected by applicable federal, state or local laws.

The Hershey Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer – Minority/Female/Disabled/Protected Veterans.