TELECOMMUTE Lead Software Engineer - AI/RAG Platform

The IT Lead Developer will provide technical leadership for planning, designing, configuring, testing, implementing, documenting, training and maintaining the solutions for the products implemented on the ServiceNow platform to meet business needs and corporate objectives., Technical Leadership

• Architect, develop, and continuously improve a production RAG agent built on Azure OpenAI - including chunking strategies, vector indexing, retrieval ranking, and prompt engineering.

• Lead full-stack development across an Angular front end and a Python-based service and LLMOps layer.

• Design and maintain MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations with inventory and merchandising systems to ground AI responses in live operational data.

• Own the model evaluation pipeline using Ragas to track faithfulness, answer relevance, and context precision metrics across releases.

• Make architectural decisions for reliability, scalability, and observability of all AI services deployed in Azure.

Team & Stakeholder Collaboration

• Lead, mentor, and conduct code reviews for a team of software engineers, fostering a culture of quality and continuous learning.

• Work closely with product managers and business stakeholders to understand associate pain points, translate them into technical requirements, and prioritize the backlog.

• Champion agile practices - participate in sprint planning, retrospectives, and daily stand-ups as a senior voice on the team.

• Communicate technical trade-offs and architectural decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Innovation & Quality

• Evaluate emerging LLM capabilities, tooling, and Azure OpenAI updates; recommend and prototype improvements to keep the platform current.

• Establish and maintain engineering best practices including CI/CD pipelines, code quality standards, and security practices for AI workloads.

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues in retrieval quality, LLM hallucination, latency, and integration reliability., Python, REST APIs, MCP

AI / LLM

Azure OpenAI (GPT-4), Azure AI Search, RAG Architecture

Evaluation

Ragas

Cloud & DevOps

Microsoft Azure, CI/CD pipelines, Agile/Scrum

Integrations

Inventory & Merchandising Systems via MCP

Work Environment

• This is a hybrid position based at our Atlanta, GA headquarters, with a standard office schedule Monday through Friday during core business hours.

• You will work in a collaborative, open-plan office environment within the IT department, with dedicated space for focused engineering work.

• The role involves regular in-person collaboration with product managers, business stakeholders, and your engineering team.

• Occasional visits to retail store locations may be required to gather associate feedback and observe how the product is used in context.

• Some extended hours may be needed around major releases or on-call rotations for production incidents.

• Standard physical requirements of a professional office environment apply - prolonged sitting, use of a computer workstation, and participation in in-person and video meetings.

• 7-10 years of professional software engineering experience, with increasing scope and ownership.

• Hands-on experience designing and deploying 2-5 production RAG agents or AI-powered applications.

• Proficiency in Python for backend services and LLM orchestration (LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or similar frameworks).

• Working knowledge of Angular or comparable modern front-end frameworks.

• Demonstrated experience with Azure OpenAI services - including LLM APIs, Azure AI Search (vector/index), and associated Azure infrastructure.

• Experience with service-based and microservice architectures, RESTful API design, and async service communication.

• Familiarity with MCP or other tool-calling/function-calling patterns for LLM-to-system integrations.

• Experience with cloud environments (Azure preferred) including compute, storage, networking, and IAM fundamentals.

• Practical knowledge of agile/scrum methodologies - sprint ceremonies, story estimation, backlog grooming., * Experience with Ragas or other LLM evaluation frameworks (RAGAS, ROUGE, G-Eval, etc.).

• Familiarity with retail systems - POS, OMS, inventory/merchandising platforms.

• Exposure to LLMOps tooling such as MLflow, Weights & Biases, or Azure ML.

• Prior experience in a Center of Excellence or innovation-focused team within a larger enterprise., Sedentary Work - Ability to exert 10 - 20 pounds of force occasionally, and/or negligible amount of force frequently to lift, carry, push, pull or otherwise move objects. Sedentary work involves sitting most of the time, but may involve walking or standing for brief periods of time.

• Be the technical lead on a live, production AI product used by thousands of associates across a national retail footprint.

• Work at the intersection of applied AI and real-world retail operations - your work has immediate, visible impact.

• Collaborate with a passionate team in a company that is genuinely investing in AI as a strategic priority.

• Competitive compensation, comprehensive benefits, and a culture that values curiosity and continuous improvement.

• Opportunities to grow into broader AI architecture and engineering leadership as the Center of Excellence scales.

Working Conditions (travel & environment)

• Limited travel required including air and car travel.
• While performing the duties of this job, the employee is occasionally exposed to a warehouse environment and moving vehicles. The noise level in the work environment is typically quiet to moderate., This job description does not constitute an employment agreement between the employer and the employee and is subject to change by the employer at its sole discretion.

Benefits & Rewards

Bonus opportunities & career advancement opportunities at every level

Programs that help you reach your financial goals: 401k with company match, Employee Stock Purchase Plan, and Referral Bonus Program

Medical, Dental, Vision, Life, and other Insurance Plans (subject to eligibility criteria)

Work-life balance, including:

• Paid vacation and sick time for eligible associates
• Paid holidays plus a personal holiday
• Paid Volunteer Time Off that starts on Day 1