AI Reliability Engineering Lead

8451; Cincinnati (OH); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Kroger Technology & Digital seeks a Senior Manager for AI Reliability Engineering to establish and lead the discipline ensuring enterprise AI operates with high reliability at scale. You will define production‑grade standards, set up the operating model, and drive resilience across model and agent platforms with cross‑functional partners.

The role emphasizes building a scalable, observable, and cost‑efficient AI infrastructure, guiding teams through readiness reviews, and shaping a culture of

Qualifications

• Minimum 10+ years of experience in software, platform, cloud, SRE or production engineering, including 3 or more years leading engineering teams.
• Experience establishing SLOs, error budgets, on‑call practices, production‑readiness reviews, incident management and post‑incident improvement programs.
• Direct experience with ML, AI or LLM systems in production, or demonstrated ability to master failure modes unique to models and agents, including drift, non‑determinism, quality regression, prompt and context issues, and hallucination.

Responsibilities

• Build the Discipline (0-to-1).
• Define what production‑grade, operationally trustworthy AI means for the enterprise, including standards and quality bars for availability, behavior, latency, cost, control and recovery.
• Stand up the AI Reliability Engineering function, its charter, operating model, roadmap, talent model and engineering culture.
• Position reliability as an enabler of AI adoption and velocity, creating the confidence that allows the business to scale AI responsibly and aggressively.
• Engineer Reliability and Quality Into Systems.
• Partner with Platform, Model and Applied AI teams to embed resilience, testability, observability and safe failure modes into AI systems from architecture forward.
• Build reliability tooling and automation, including self‑healing, automated evaluations, quality‑regression detection, guardrail instrumentation and safe deployment controls.

Skills

Leadership experience

AI/ML in production

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Cloud infrastructure (GCP/Azure)

Observability

SRE practices

Executive communication

Tools

LangSmith

MLflow

Arize

Fiddler

Job description

Kroger Technology & Digital seeks a Senior Manager for AI Reliability Engineering to establish and lead the discipline ensuring enterprise AI operates with high reliability at scale. You will define production‑grade standards, set up the operating model, and drive resilience across model and agent platforms with cross‑functional partners.

The role emphasizes building a scalable, observable, and cost‑efficient AI infrastructure, guiding teams through readiness reviews, and shaping a culture of