Architect Director for AI Acceleration at 84.51°

We are 84.51°, a retail data science and media company that turns first-party purchase data from more than 62 million U.S. households into personalized shopper experiences for The Kroger Co., CPG brands, agencies, and publishers. We are looking for an Architect Director for AI Acceleration to design and scale the platforms that will embed advanced AI across every part of our business.

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end AI solutions that balance business goals, data availability, and technical limits while identifying gaps in our current architecture.
• Partner daily with data scientists, engineers, and product leads to translate requirements into scalable platform capabilities.
• Apply change-management, automation, and performance-measurement practices that keep the AI platform stable and reliable.
• Introduce industry best practices and emerging standards to continuously improve team processes and tooling.
• Shape enterprise architecture plans, evaluate system requests for cost and feasibility, and ensure alignment with both long-term strategy and immediate needs.
• Produce clear documentation for AI architectures, models, and operational processes.
• Recruit, mentor, and grow high-performing teams through a servant-leadership approach.
• Present strategic visions and technical updates to both technical teams and executive leadership.
• Build collaborative ties with Kroger Technology to share practices and deliver joint initiatives.

Must-haves

• Bachelor’s degree or higher plus relevant technology or project-management certifications.
• Seven or more years of hands-on work in infrastructure, cloud, or software development.
• Seven or more years applying advanced algorithms, programming languages, or modern technologies.
• Strong, current expertise in cloud computing solutions and trends.
• Hands-on delivery experience with at least two major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP, or OCI) in hybrid or multi-cloud environments.
• Extensive practical experience with CI/CD pipelines, service-oriented architecture, infrastructure as code, and containerization.
• Working knowledge of machine-learning and AI principles and development workflows.
• Proven success leading lean, agile teams that operate across distributed locations.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills on technical topics.
• Comfort learning new tools quickly and making independent, time-sensitive decisions.
• Strong project-management skills to juggle multiple priorities.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate across technology and governance roles to deliver systems that improve efficiency and support business strategy.
• One to two years of operational experience (LLMOps) with large-language or transformer-based models, including training, deployment, and scaling on GPU/TPU clusters.
• Two to three years designing and running scalable stateful services such as context-aware chatbots using LLMOps and full-stack application patterns.
• Knowledge of AI-safety practices including adversarial testing, sandboxing, red-teaming, AI firewalls, and content filtering.
• One to two years architecting retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG) patterns and working with vector databases and hybrid data stores.
• Ability to evaluate third-party AI-Ops tools and vendors independently.
• Fluency in English.

Nice-to-haves

• Four or more years in technology consulting, retail, or related professional services.

Benefits

• Fully remote work for candidates with permanent U.S. residence.