AI Engineer: Lead Production ML & Applied AI

Who We Are

We’re not in the wing business. We’re in the flavor business. It’s been our mission to Serve the World Flavor since we first opened in 1994, and we’re just getting started. 1997 saw the opening of our first brand partner operated Wingstop location, and by 2002 we had served the world one billion wings. It’s flavor that defines us and has made Wingstop one of the fastest growing brands in the restaurant industry.

Who We Are

We’re not in the wing business. We’re in the flavor business. It’s been our mission to Serve the World Flavor since we first opened in 1994, and we’re just getting started. 1997 saw the opening of our first brand partner operated Wingstop location, and by 2002 we had served the world one billion wings. It’s flavor that defines us and has made Wingstop one of the fastest growing brands in the restaurant industry.

Above all else – our success is largely due to our people and our core values, or what we call The Wingstop Way of being entrepreneurial, service-minded, fun, and authentic. We believe having a strong people foundation centered on these collective values creates a crave-worthy culture and talented team, as well as ensures our brand is poised for accelerated growth. We all win together.

What We’ll Need

Wingstop is seeking a Staff Engineer, Applied AI to lead the team that takes AI from prototype to production across the enterprise. You will own end-to-end delivery of applied AI solutions from problem framing with business partners through deployment, monitoring, and measured impact. This role leads a team of applied AI engineers and data scientists working across restaurant operations, digital ordering, supply chain, and guest experience.

You will set the technical direction for how Wingstop builds, ships, and sustains AI systems, and you will be accountable for the business results those systems produce. This role is based at the Global Support Center in Dallas, TX.

Role Responsibilities

• Lead a team of applied AI engineers and data scientists
• Own end-to-end delivery of AI solutions: problem framing, modeling, deployment, monitoring, and iteration
• Partner with business stakeholders to translate operational problems into AI use cases with clear success metrics
• Set technical standards for model development, evaluation, deployment, and ongoing performance monitoring
• Prioritize the applied AI roadmap, balancing near-term wins against long-term platform and capability investment
• Partner with Data Engineering and BI to ensure solutions are built on reliable, production-grade data
• Establish MLOps practices, CI/CD for models, reproducibility, versioning, and automated retraining
• Govern responsible AI use: model risk, bias evaluation, data privacy, and third-party model decisions
• Drive build-vs-buy decisions across LLM providers, ML platforms, and AI vendors
• Communicate results, tradeoffs, and roadmap to senior leadership in business terms
• Lead proofs of concept in emerging areas including generative AI, forecasting, computer vision, and intelligent automation

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, Mathematics, or a related quantitative field (or equivalent practical experience)
• Master’s or PhD preferred

• Cloud certifications (AWS preferred) are a plus

• 10+ years in data science, machine learning, or applied AI engineering, including leadership roles
• 3+ years managing technical teams with a track record of shipping AI into production
• Deep hands-on experience with Python and the modern ML stack (scikit-learn, PyTorch or Tensor Flow, pandas)
• Production ML experience: deployment, serving, monitoring, drift detection, and retraining
• Experience with LLM and generative AI…