Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Foot Locker is seeking a technology leader to build and run the engineering team delivering Generative AI, Agentic AI, and intelligent automation products across its retail enterprise. The Sr. Manager owns the team’s delivery, reliability, governance, costs, and operating model, partnering with business, product, architecture, and data leaders to turn enterprise AI strategy into production capabilities.
Responsibilities
- People leadership: hire, coach, and develop a team of AI and automation engineers; set expectations, run performance and career conversations, and build a durable bench across levels
- Delivery ownership: own the roadmap, commitments, and end-to-end delivery of AI agents, RAG solutions, automation workflows, APIs, and enterprise integrations
- Operating model: define how work enters the team, how it is prioritized, and how capacity is allocated across PODs, business domains, and shared platform work
- Engineering standards: establish and enforce standards for code quality, testing, evaluation, documentation, security, observability, and operational readiness
- Production accountability: own reliability, incident response, service levels, and remediation for AI and automation solutions in production
- Evaluation and quality: require measurable evaluation of every AI capability before and after release, including groundedness, retrieval quality, task success, latency, and cost per task
- Cost and consumption management: forecast and manage token, compute, platform, and licensing spend; drive unit-cost improvement as usage scales
- Governance and risk: operationalize Responsible AI, security, privacy, PII protection, RBAC, model and prompt governance, and audit readiness in partnership with Security, Legal, and Risk
- Architecture partnership: translate enterprise AI reference architectures and guardrails into delivered implementations, and feed production learning back into the standards
- Business partnership: work directly with business and product leaders to shape demand, define measurable outcomes, and communicate trade-offs, sequencing, and capacity realities
- Vendor and platform management: evaluate AI platforms, models, and vendors; manage contracts, renewals, consumption commitments, and partner performance
- Reuse and leverage: drive reusable services, agents, skills, connectors, and accelerators so that each new use case costs less to deliver than the last
- Executive communication: report portfolio health, risk, adoption, and value realization to directors and executive leadership
- The Sr. Manager, AI & Automation role has direct supervisory responsibility for a team of engineers, senior engineers, and contract resources. Responsibilities include hiring, onboarding, goal setting, coaching, performance management, career development, and resource planning, carried out in accordance with Foot Locker policies and applicable laws
Skills
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, applied AI, automation, or related technology areas
- 3+ years of direct people leadership, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing engineers across levels
- Demonstrated track record of delivering production technology products at enterprise scale, not proofs of concept
- Working technical depth in Generative AI, LLMs, Agentic AI, RAG, embeddings, vector search, prompt engineering, and AI orchestration — sufficient to lead design reviews, challenge technical choices, and earn the trust of senior engineers
- Familiarity with Python, SQL, REST APIs, cloud architecture, and modern data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks
- Experience with LLMOps, CI/CD, evaluation frameworks, AI observability, and production monitoring
- Strong understanding of Responsible AI, data governance, security, privacy, RBAC, and regulatory compliance in an enterprise environment
- Proven ability to own budget, vendor relationships, consumption forecasting, and cost management for a technology portfolio
- Experience leading distributed and blended teams, including onshore, offshore, and contract resources
- Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to influence engineering teams, business stakeholders, directors, and executive leadership
- The successful candidate will have a high degree of motivation, exceptional attention to detail, and the ability to derive answers from communications with multiple parts of the business
- This person will also require the ability to work well within a team atmosphere and has the flexibility to help with a variety of the department goals
- Bachelor's degree (B.S.) from a four-year college or university in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, and 7 or more years of related experience and/or training, or an equivalent combination of education and experience
- The candidate must be able to communicate with others in a simple, clear, and understandable manner
- Must also have the ability to read and interpret all forms of communication
- The ability to write reports for management and professional correspondence, as well as to speak effectively before peers, management, customers, and other associates of the organization is required
- The candidate must effectively plan and execute unusual and difficult work
- Takes initiative and is decisive and quick, when appropriate
- Must have the ability to solve practical and impractical problems and deal with a variety of concrete variables in situations where only limited standardization exists
- Ability to interpret a variety of instructions furnished in written, oral, diagram, or schedule form
- Deals constructively with conflict and disagreement
- Foot Locker will not sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization, or offer any immigration related support for this position (i.e. H1B, F-1 OPT, F-1 STEM OPT, F-1 CPT, J-1, TN, or another type of work authorization
- Experience in Retail, Digital Commerce, Supply Chain, or Customer Analytics domains preferred
- Experience working in Agile product delivery environments preferred
- Experience with Azure OpenAI, Snowflake Cortex AI, Databricks, the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem, Power BI/Fabric, AI gateways, and Model Context Protocol (MCP), or equivalent technologies
- Experience standing up a new AI or automation capability from initial team through sustained production operation
- Experience managing managers or technical leads
- Public cloud experience, preferably Azure or AWS
- Previous experience at a Fortune 500 company
- Comfortable operating with ambiguity and setting direction before the standard is fully defined
Benefits
- 100% remote, US based
- Employee Discount
- Paid Time Off
- Medical | Dental | Vision Coverage
- 401(k) | Roth 401(k)
- Life Insurance
- Flexible Spending Account
- Opportunities for Advancement
- Tuition Reimbursement for Qualified Courses
- Strong Company Culture
- Employee Resource Groups
Company Overview