Director Engineering - AI, Pricing Intelligence [T500-21082]

About Albertsons Companies Inc.:

As a leading food and drug retailer in the United States, Albertsons Companies, Inc. operates over 2,200 stores across 35 states and the District of Columbia. Our well-known banners across the United States, including Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco and others, serve more than 36 million U.S customers each week.

We build and shape technology solutions that solve customers’ problems every day, making things easier for them when they shop with us online or in a store. We have made bold, strategic moves to migrate and modernize our core foundational capabilities, positioning ourselves as the first fully cloud-based grocery tech company in the industry.

Our success is built on a one-team approach, driven by the desire to understand and enhance the customer experience. By constantly pushing the boundaries of retail, we are transforming shopping into an experience that is easy, efficient, fun and engaging.

About Albertsons Companies India:

At Albertsons Companies India, we're not just pushing the boundaries of technology and retail innovation, we're cultivating a space where ideas flourish and careers thrive. Our workplace in India is a vital extension of the Albertsons Companies Inc. workforce and important to the next phase in the company’s technology journey to support millions of customers’ lives every day.

At the Albertsons Companies India, we are raising the bar to grow across Technology & Engineering, AI, Digital and other company functions, and transform a 165-year-old American retailer. At Albertsons Companies India associates collaborate directly with international teams, enhancing decision-making processes and organizational agility through exciting and pivotal projects. Your work will make history and help millions of lives each day come together around the joys of food and inspire their well-being.

Position Title: Director Engineering

Overview:

We are seeking a highly experienced AI leader to drive the execution, adoption, and integration of AI-driven solutions that optimize price and promotional investment decisions at scale.

This role is not a learn-on-the-job opportunity—the ideal candidate must have hands-on expertise in:

Building and deploying Explainable AI (XAI) solutions that ensure AI-driven decisions are interpretable and trusted.

Developing and fine-tuning Generative AI (Gen AI) models that power business-critical decision-making.

Feature engineering and data preparation techniques, ensuring AI models are trained on harmonized, structured data that aligns with real-world business needs.

This is a delivery-focused AI leadership role, ensuring that AI solutions are actionable, explainable, and embedded into enterprise decision-making. The focus is not on AI platform development but on optimizing price and promotional investment strategies through AI-driven insights.

Key Responsibilities:

AI-Driven Price & Promo Optimization:

• Develop and operationalize AI-powered pricing, markdown, and trade investment strategies to drive real-time financial decision-making.
• Design and deploy XAI & Gen AI solutions that provide clear, explainable recommendations for merchants, finance, and investment teams.
• Ensure AI models align with price and promo strategies, optimizing trade investment allocation, promotional effectiveness, and ROI maximization.
• Develop counterfactual simulations to test multiple pricing and investment scenarios before execution.

AI Adoption & Business Integration:

• AI adoption is the key success metric—solutions must be trusted, embedded, and actively used in merchant and finance workflows.
• Work across merchants, finance teams, national groups, and technology teams to align AI-driven pricing strategies with business priorities.
• Ensure AI-driven recommendations are interpretable and actionable, allowing non-technical stakeholders to make data-driven investment decisions with confidence.
• Serve as the AI enabler by translating technical AI models into business-ready insights that are easy to understand and apply.

AI Solution Development, XAI & Model Effectiveness:

• Hands-on expertise in building, deploying, and scaling Explainable AI (XAI) solutions to ensure AI-driven decisions are transparent and actionable.
• Extensive experience in Generative AI (Gen AI) model development and fine-tuning, ensuring AI models support structured business reasoning and pricing optimization.
• Expert in model interpretability techniques such as SHAP, LIME, and Counterfactual Explanations, ensuring users can trust and act on AI recommendations.
• Deep knowledge of AI model evaluation and effectiveness metrics, including AUC-ROC, precision-recall, calibration techniques, and loss functions tied to financial impact.
• This role requires previous hands-on work developing AI models—it is not for those looking to gain experience in XAI or Gen AI on the job.

Advanced Feature Engineering & Data Preparation:

• Proven hands-on experience in feature engineering and structured data preparation to ensure AI models capture the right business drivers.
• Expertise in causal modeling, counterfactual analysis, and data imputation techniques, ensuring robust, high-quality training data.
• Lead exploratory data analysis (EDA) efforts to uncover patterns that drive price and investment optimization.
• Strong understanding of financial and retail data frameworks, ensuring AI models align with profitability, margin optimization, and competitive positioning.

Scalable AI Deployment, Governance & AI Ops:

• Collaborate with AI Platform, AI Ops, and Cloud Engineering teams to ensure scalable AI deployment, governance, and operationalization.
• Ensure AI models are production-ready, resilient, and compliant with enterprise AI governance standards.
• Work with AI infrastructure teams to optimize model performance, inference speed, and cost efficiency across cloud and on-prem environments.
• Develop best practices for AI monitoring, retraining pipelines, and bias detection, ensuring continuous AI model improvement.

Qualifications:

• Experience in AI/ML, data science, and AI-driven decision optimization, with at least 5 years in leadership roles.
• Proven, hands-on expertise in XAI & Gen AI—this is not a learn-on-the-job role.
• Hands-on experience with explainability techniques (SHAP, LIME, Counterfactuals) and model effectiveness methodologies (AUC-ROC, loss functions, calibration techniques).
• Extensive hands-on experience in feature engineering, structured data preparation, and causal modeling.
• Experience beyond LLMs, with exposure to deep research models, reasoning-based AI, or structured AI-driven decision frameworks.
• Track record of leading AI-driven business transformation in large, complex enterprises.
• Strong ability to communicate AI-driven insights to non-technical stakeholders, ensuring trust and adoption.
• Master’s or PhD in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, or related field preferred.