Sr. Staff Engineer AI Incubation

Sr. Staff Engineer – Ai (AI Incubation)

Why choose us?

Are you ready to take the next step in your career? Join us for an exciting opportunity at Albertsons Companies, where innovation and customer service go hand-in-hand!

At Albertsons Companies, we are looking for someone who's not just seeking a job, but someone who wants to make an impact. In this role, you'll have the opportunity to lead, innovate, and contribute to the growth of a company that values great service and lasting customer relationships. This position offers the chance to work in a fast-paced, dynamic environment that's constantly evolving.

Bring your flavor

Building the future of food and well-being starts with you. Join our team and bring your best self to the table.

What you will be doing

The AI Incubation team sits within the Data & AI organization and helps identify, shape, and accelerate high-value AI opportunities across the business. This includes advancing Albertsons' Four Big Bets in AI: digital customer experience, merchandising intelligence, empowering associates and leaders, and end-to-end supply chain optimization.

The AI Incubation team has an opening for a Sr. Staff Engineer – AI (AI Incubation). This position is located in Pleasanton, California.

Position Purpose

The Sr. Staff Engineer – AI (AI Incubation) will partner with business, product, and technology leaders to identify, shape, and accelerate high-value AI opportunities across the enterprise. This is a senior role for a leader who can move fluidly from problem framing to solution design, from stakeholder alignment to execution planning, and from incubation to enterprise scale.

Success in this role will come from the ability to convert ambiguity into clear priorities, credible solution paths, and measurable business outcomes. The role will help connect incubation priorities to Albertsons' Four Big Bets in AI and improve the quality and speed with which ideas move from concept to deployment.

Why this role matters?

This role sits at the front end of Albertsons' AI transformation, where enterprise priorities are translated into practical solutions with scale potential. It offers direct exposure to senior stakeholders, high-value problem spaces, and the opportunity to shape how AI is deployed across one of the largest grocery and pharmacy retailers in the U.S.

Main responsibilities:

• Partner with senior leaders to identify, prioritize, and frame high-value AI opportunities tied to enterprise strategy and measurable outcomes.
• Build trusted relationships across business, product, and technology teams to strengthen the AI incubation funnel and improve cross-functional alignment.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into clear problem statements, solution hypotheses, business cases, and roadmaps.
• Orchestrate cross-functional teams across product, engineering, data, architecture, security, and platform functions from discovery through pilot and production readiness.
• Shape AI initiatives across customer, merchandising, marketing, loyalty, operations, supply chain, pharmacy, and corporate domains.
• Design enterprise-scale AI solution architectures spanning Data, ML, Foundation Models, RAG, Agentic Systems, AI Platforms, and enterprise integrations, with robust governance and production readiness.
• Build prototypes and evaluate emerging AI capabilities, including foundation models, prompting strategies, retrieval architectures, and agent orchestration patterns to accelerate production adoption.
• Establish reusable AI reference architectures, engineering standards, and solution accelerators that enable scalable, secure, and cost-effective AI adoption across the enterprise.
• Establish success metrics, experimentation plans, and adoption pathways that improve speed-to-decision and value realization.
• Accelerate initiatives from concept to pilot or production-ready design while improving the quality of governance, evaluation, and handoff into enterprise deployment.
• Provide technical leadership and mentorship across engineering, platform, and data science teams, influencing architecture and engineering decisions through deep technical expertise.
• Drive technical excellence by defining best…