Applied AI Lead Developer

Salary: $132,000 - 160,000 per year Requirements: Be authorized to work in the United States without current or future visa sponsorship. Work full time onsite at our Family Dollar Store Support Center in Chesapeake, Virginia. Hold a bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field; a masters degree is preferred. Bring at least 5 years of progressive IT experience on large, cross-functional teams or projects, preferably in retail. Have at least 2 years of experience developing AI solutions in a leading role. Be able to write clean, well-tested, well-documented code, review code, and contribute to internal libraries, templates, and engineering best practices. Demonstrate urgency and the ability to guide a delivery team toward results in a dynamic environment. Be able to develop, present, and communicate technical concepts to audiences with varying levels of technical knowledge. Have experience in retail, supply chain, or large-scale operational environments, including systems such as POS, ERP, CRM, inventory, or supply chain platforms. Bring advanced knowledge of recent generative AI platform developments, along with experience in Google Cloud Platform, generative AI, LLMs, and agentic frameworks. Responsibilities: Translate business needs into AI solutions that can be delivered quickly and iteratively on Google Cloud Platform. Develop agentic AI applications using modern agent development kits and frameworks, including multi-agent workflows, tool integrations, and human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Build and operate retrieval-augmented generation solutions grounded in our enterprise data, including data ingestion, embeddings, and vector capabilities. Deploy and maintain production-grade AI agents that can reason, use tools, and execute multistep tasks. Establish and maintain MLOps and CI/CD pipelines for AI workloads, including model and prompt versioning, evaluation, monitoring, cost controls, and rollback procedures. Implement enterprise AI safeguards, including prompt-injection defenses, PII handling, content safety, role-based access controls, and audit logging; partner with platform, security, infrastructure, and business teams to meet our standards for identity, networking, data residency, and compliance. Define integration approaches for AI applications across our IT environment, including APIs and data contracts for identity, networking, data, and retail systems; collaborate with the teams responsible for those systems. Maintain technical quality across the teams AI work by setting engineering standards, reviewing code, and managing technical debt so solutions remain maintainable and operable. Work with IT support to transition services through SOPs, runbooks, dashboards, on-call coverage, alerting, and escalation support after handover. Lead and mentor the engineering team, sharing knowledge and establishing technical standards across our AI and Automation team. Provide technical on-call coverage as needed. Perform other duties as assigned. Technologies: Agentic AI AI AI Agents CI/CD Cloud CRM ERP Support MLOps Security Ada RAG More: We are hiring a hands-on AI Lead Developer and senior technical staff engineer to lead developers while building AI applications, analytical solutions, and software from incubation through deployment. This role supports our efforts to develop AI in-house and evaluate vendor and partner products for use across our cloud environments, digital applications, and operational systems. The position is full time and fully onsite at our Family Dollar Store Support Center, 510 Volvo Parkway, Chesapeake, Virginia 23320. We handle relocation for candidates from outside the Hampton Roads area. The projected salary range is $132,000–$160,000, with a 20% annual bonus opportunity and other incentives. We are an equal opportunity employer committed to fair employment decisions and to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals with disabilities. last updated 42 week of 2026