Director, AI Product Engineering

Serving customers and our community starts with the best people doing their best work. That is precisely what we have created at MSC Industrial Supply Co. We are a leading North American distributor of metalworking and maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO), products and services. We offer more than 2 million products and have over 80 years of experience across dozens of industries.

We aim to execute our Built to Make You Better brand promise for all our stakeholders, including our associates.

Employment Type

:
Full Time

Job Category :
Digital/IT

Work Location :
Davidson, NC

The Company is moving from localized AI experiments to a coordinated portfolio of AI products and agentic automation that create competitive advantage and close longstanding gaps in core business systems. The Director, AI Product Engineering leads the in-house build function for this work and is accountable for designing, engineering, releasing, and supporting the AI products, agents, and automations that the business depends on.

This position partners closely with the Director, AI Product Management, who owns the roadmap, use‑case portfolio, and build‑versus‑buy decisions, and with the Director, AI Governance & Operations, who owns the AI inventory, controls, evaluation standards, and production approval. The role also works with Technology, Enterprise Architecture, Data, Cybersecurity, and line‑of‑business leaders to ensure solutions are well architected, secure, integrated with core systems, and adopted in day‑to‑day workflows.

The Director, AI Product Engineering is a hands‑on, player‑coach leader who brings engineering discipline to AI: clear architecture patterns, reusable components, automated evaluation and testing, staged releases, and production observability. This leader shortens the time between identifying a business problem and shipping a working, supportable fix.

• Lead the AI Product Engineering team, including Domain AI Products and Agentic Automation, setting priorities, standards, and delivery cadence aligned with the enterprise business systems and AI roadmap.
• Design, build, and deliver domain AI products for lines of business (e.g., sales, customer service, supply chain, pricing, finance, and associate productivity) that are grounded in documented business requirements and measurable outcomes.
• Build agentic automation and AI‑enabled workflows that replace manual, reactive, or periodic processes with proactive, continuous ones, integrating with core systems such as ERP, CRM, eCommerce, and service platforms.
• Own AI solution architecture for in‑house builds.
• Lead AI and application engineering practices, including code quality, version control, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, environment management, and secure development standards.
• Own release delivery for AI products and agents, including staged rollouts, release gates, rollback procedures, and change control, in partnership with AI Governance & Operations.
• Build automated evaluation into the engineering lifecycle, including accuracy, safety, and regression testing, prompt and model versioning, and pre‑release quality checks.
• Implement LLMOps and production observability, including logging and traceability of agent actions, latency, cost and token usage tracking, drift detection, alerting, and incident runbooks.
• Evaluate and select models, frameworks, and platforms for in‑house builds, balancing capability, cost, security, and supportability, and provide technical input on build‑versus‑buy decisions led by AI Product Management.
• Partner with Cybersecurity, Data, and Enterprise Architecture to ensure solutions meet data protection, data classification, access…