Sr. Manager, AI and Automation Engineering - Remote

Senior Manager, AI And Process Automation

This senior manager leads the engineering, quality, deployment, and production support of AI and process automation solutions across their full lifecycle within UNFI's Technology organization. The role entails translating approved priorities and projects into executable development and deployment plans, managing development teams and vendor partners, overseeing rapid prototyping, and ensuring solutions are built, deployed, and supported in production with appropriate quality and operational discipline.

The position will support execution of UNFI's AI and automation roadmap by managing delivery of practical use cases across business operations such as distribution, supply chain, warehouse, customer, finance, and enterprise support functions through leading a robust AI and process automation solution engineering practice. The role is expected to balance hands-on solution understanding with team leadership, production support ownership, vendor coordination, and continuous improvement of deployed automation and agentic AI capabilities.

Job Responsibilities:

• Manage full SDLC delivery of GenAI/Agentic and process automation initiatives aligned to priorities set by Technology leadership and business stakeholders.
• Own engineering execution and technical delivery quality for approved solutions, including build standards, code and configuration review, environment readiness, resource readiness, and direct oversight of third-party developers and offshore build partners to ensure work meets UNFI engineering, security, and support standards before release.
• Lead rapid prototyping efforts to validate feasibility, user experience, data availability, security considerations, cost assumptions, and operational fit before moving solutions into full development.
• Oversee solution engineering and development of agentic AI and automation solutions, including reusable development frameworks and standards, using approved enterprise platforms such as Microsoft Copilot Studio, AWS Bedrock, Automation Anywhere, Power Platform, and related technologies.
• Guide solution engineering teams on practical design patterns for prompts, workflows, retrieval, tool use, approvals, exception handling, logging, and human-in-the-loop controls.
• Ensure automation work includes appropriate process review so solutions improve business execution rather than simply automating inefficient steps.
• Coordinate development, testing, deployment, hypercare, and transition-to-support activities for AI and automation solutions.
• Own the quality engineering and QA function for AI and automation solutions, including test strategy, test automation, model/agent evaluation harnesses, regression coverage, quality gates prior to release, and defect trend analysis across in-house and third-party built solutions.
• Manage production support for deployed solutions, including issue triage, monitoring, runbook readiness, incident coordination, root cause follow-up, defect prioritization, and stabilization actions.
• Apply established Technology standards for release management, change control, documentation, testing, access management, security review, and operational handoff.
• Manage analysts, developers, engineers, offshore resources, contingent workforce, and delivery partners by setting work priorities, reviewing deliverables, resolving delivery blockers, and maintaining accountability for assigned outcomes.
• Manage vendor and delivery-partner engagements, including scope and SOW alignment, deliverable quality, performance against commitments, and day-to-day coordination for both development and production support.
• Work with architecture, security, cloud, data, compliance, and business teams to ensure solutions follow approved patterns and are ready for responsible use in production.
• Track delivery progress, production health, adoption, issues, risks, and benefits realization; provide clear updates and recommendations to the IT Leadership and relevant stakeholders.
• Coach team members on GenAI, agentic AI, process automation, delivery discipline, documentation quality, and production support expectations.
• Performs other duties as assigned.

Job…