Software Engineering Director

84.51° Overview:

84.51° is a retail data science, insights and media company. We help The Kroger Co., consumer packaged goods companies, agencies, publishers and affiliates create more personalized and valuable experiences for shoppers across the path to purchase.

Powered by cutting-edge science, we utilize first-party retail data from more than 62 million U.S. households sourced through the Kroger Plus loyalty card program to fuel a more customer-centric journey using 84.51° Insights, 84.51° Loyalty Marketing and our retail media advertising solution, Kroger Precision Marketing.

84.51° follows a 5‑day in‑office work schedule to support collaboration, alignment, and team connection.

Join us at 84.51°!

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DIRECTOR, SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (P4474)

SUMMARY:
The AI Enablement team at 84.51° is seeking a Director of Software Engineering for its Agentic Foundations team. This team is responsible for designing, developing, and maintaining the agentic backbone of the Kroger enterprise, including platforms, patterns, and tools to support the best practice development of AI agents.
The Director of Engineering requires a unique mix of software engineering and AI skills necessary to lead the technical design of platforms, patterns, and tools to support the enterprise agentic ecosystem. This role has a focus on providing the technical leadership needed for engineering and data science development teams implementing solutions like agent/MCP/scorer/prompt registries, agent-related tools to aid in the development and monitoring of best practice agents and tools, and managing low-code and no-code agent platforms that integrate with agentic support.

RESPONSIBILITIES:
Partner with the Director of Product Management for Agentic Foundations to jointly lead the space for the Kroger enterprise
Lead and manage a team of engineers, guiding them in the design and development of their product/platform areas and in the management of their own reports
Lead and manage hiring efforts for engineers on the Agentic Foundations team, including finding interview panelists, writing interview guides and questions, and assisting with coding screening questions
Own and manage offshore reliability engineering teams
Provide in-depth technical leadership in the scoping and implementation of enterprise-grade solutions to support agents across the Kroger enterprise
Provide operational leadership across agentic platforms, ensuring enterprise-grade reliability, observability, and incident management
Maintain an up-to-date expertise on agentic workflows, frameworks, platforms, and best practices to identify and inform new capabilities for implementation Foster a collaborative and innovative team environment, encouraging professional growth and development among team members Reduce the development time of the team by leveraging agentic SDLC tooling provided by the enterprise Lead the abstraction of tooling and services to user-friendly interfaces like APIs, Python packages, or UIs Understand business requirements and trade-off scale, risk, and accuracy to maximize value and translate research into consumable products or services Guide the development teams to follow software development standards, including version control, documentation, testing, and support Make time-sensitive decisions and solve urgent problems without escalation