Senior AI Engineer (Remote)

With a career at The Home Depot, you can be yourself and also be part of something bigger. Position Purpose: The Senior AI Engineer is responsible for designing, building, scaling, and optimizing production-grade Agentic AI systems that drive measurable business outcomes across The Home Depot. Operating at the intersection of Data Science, Machine Learning Engineering, and Software Engineering, this hands-on role translates AI concepts into enterprise-ready products. This role involves developing scalable applications powered by LLMs, SLMs, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks, and autonomous agents. You will build the core orchestration layers for multi-agent workflows, tool integration, and planning, alongside the infrastructure required for reliable, large-scale cloud deployment. By partnering with product, engineering, and business teams, you will rapidly prototype solutions, navigate ambiguity, and seamlessly transition cutting-edge AI capabilities from concept to production. Required skills - Experience: 6+ years of experience in AI, Machine Learning Engineering, or Software Engineering with strong Python development skills and modern software engineering practices. - AI Delivery: Proven experience building and deploying production-grade AI solutions using LLMs, SLMs, RAG frameworks, copilots, agents, and multi-agent systems. - AI Foundations: Deep understanding of AI/ML foundations, including transformers, embeddings, deep learning, prompt engineering, agentic reasoning patterns, and vector databases. - Orchestration & Integration: Experience developing orchestration layers (task execution, routing, planning, workflows) and seamlessly integrating AI solutions with enterprise platforms, APIs, and business systems. - Infrastructure & MLOps: Expertise in cloud-native architectures, containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes/GKE), infrastructure as code (e.g., Terraform), and AI pipeline design, with hands-on implementation of MLOps/LLMOps best practices (CI/CD, automated testing, model versioning and registries, governance, compliance, and security) across the full AI/agent lifecycle. - AIOps & Deployment Reliability: Experience building automated CI/CD pipelines for AI/agentic systems, implementing progressive rollout strategies (canary, blue-green, and shadow deployments) with automated rollback, and establishing end-to-end observability (logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and automated alerting) across models, agents, and orchestration layers to ensure production reliability, performance, and cost/token efficiency at scale. - Optimization & Debugging: Demonstrated ability to optimize complex AI systems for performance, reliability, scalability, latency, cost efficiency, and token use, as well as debugging operational failure modes. - Execution & Collaboration: Excellent cross-functional communication and collaboration skills, with a proven ability to take AI solutions from concept to production in complex enterprise environments. Key Responsibilities: - 70% Delivery and Execution - Collaborates and pairs with other product team members (UX, engineering, and product management) to create secure, reliable, scalable machine learning solutions; Documents, reviews, and ensures that all quality and change control standards are met; Works with Product Team to ensure user stories that are developer-ready, easy to understand, and testable; Writes custom code or scripts to automate infrastructure, monitoring services, and test cases; Writes custom code or scripts to do "destructive testing" to ensure adequate resiliency in production; Configures commercial off the shelf solutions to align with evolving business needs; Creates meaningful dashboards, logging, alerting, and responses to ensure that issues are captured and addressed proactively - 10% Learning - Participates in learning activities around modern software design, machine learning, and development core practices (communities of practice); Proactively views articles, tutorials, and videos to learn about new technologies and best practices being used within other technology organizations - 20% Support and Enablement - Fields questions from other product teams or support teams; Monitors tools and participates in conversations to encourage collaboration across product teams; Provides application support for software running in production; Proactively monitors production Service Level Objectives for products; Proactively reviews the Performance and Capacity of all aspects of production: code, infrastructure, data, message processing, and prediction quality Direct Manager/Direct Reports: - This Position typically reports to Software Engineer Manager or Sr. Software Engineer Manager - This Position has 0 Direct Reports Travel Requirements: - Typically requires overnight travel 5% to 20% of the time. Physical Requirements: - Most of the time is spent sitting in a comfortable position and there is frequent opportunity to move about. On rare occasions there may be a need to move or lift light articles. Working Conditions: - Located in a comfortable indoor area. Any unpleasant conditions would be infrequent and not objectionable. Minimum Qualifications: - Must be eighteen years of age or older. - Must be legally permitted to work in the United States. Preferred Qualifications: - Tools & Frameworks: Hands-on experience with Vertex AI, Gemini, Google ADK, LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, or similar orchestration tools and frameworks. - AI Infrastructure & Platform Tooling: Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform), Kubernetes/GKE for container orchestration, GPU/accelerator provisioning and autoscaling, model registries, feature stores, and vector database operations at production scale. - Full‑stack skills: Node.js/React/REST, API design, performance optimization, Linux, Git, modern deployment toolchain. - Industry Context: Background in retail, supply chain, manufacturing, eCommerce, logistics, or finance where Applied ML is mature. - Guardrails & Reliability: Knowledge and experience in establishing Responsible AI, evaluation frameworks, reliability engineering, and AI governance guardrails. - Leadership & Innovation: A proven track record of driving innovation, delivering measurable business impact, mentoring engineering teams, and establishing AI engineering standards and best practices. - Master’s or bachelor’s in computer science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or a related technical discipline. Minimum Education: - The knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a high school diploma and/or GED. Preferred Education: - No additional education Minimum Years of Work Experience: - 2 Preferred Years of Work Experience: - No additional years of experience Minimum Leadership Experience: - None Preferred Leadership Experience: - None Certifications: - None Competencies: - Global Perspective - Manages Ambiguity - Nimble Learning - Self-Development - Collaborates - Cultivates Innovation - Situational Adaptability - Communicates Effectively - Drives Results - Interpersonal Savvy Benefits offered include health care benefits, 401K, ESPP, paid time off, and success sharing bonus.  For a full list of the various benefits The Home Depot offers, visit https://careers.homedepot.com/our-benefits. For California, Colorado, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Nevada, New York City, Ithaca (NY), Westchester County (NY), and Washington residents:   The pay range for this position is between $100,000.00 - $250,000.00