AI Reliability Engineering Leader — Production-Grade AI

84.51˚; Cincinnati (OH); On-site; USD 190,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

84.51° is seeking a Senior Manager, AI Reliability Engineering within Kroger Technology & Digital to design and lead a new discipline ensuring production-grade AI that is dependable, scalable and cost-efficient for enterprise use. You will define standards, build a charter, and guide cross‑functional teams from platform to applied AI.

You will enable reliable AI through observability, guardrails, and incident practices, own service level indicators, and partner with Model, Gateway and

Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in software, platform, cloud, SRE or production engineering.
• 3+ years leading engineering teams.
• Strong track record building engineering capabilities, standards, automation or platforms that improved system quality and reliability at scale.
• Experience with ML, AI or LLM systems in production, including drift and quality regression.
• Ability to influence architecture and roadmaps, lead through ambiguity and drive outcomes without direct authority.
• Excellent technical and executive communication.

Responsibilities

• Define production-grade, operationally trustworthy AI standards for the enterprise, including availability, latency, cost and recovery.
• Stand up the AI Reliability Engineering function, its charter, operating model and roadmap.
• Embed resilience, testability, observability and safe failure modes into AI systems from architecture forward.
• Build reliability tooling and automation, including self-healing, automated evaluations and guardrail controls.
• Establish service-level indicators and objectives, error budgets and reliability scorecards to guide decisions.
• Own Production Quality, Observability and AgentOps across platforms and agents.
• Drive efficiency and performance by optimizing inference cost and token usage with scale.
• Lead launch-readiness reviews for new platforms, models and agents with clear readiness paths.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kubernetes

Cloud infrastructure

SRE

Production engineering

Executive communication

Tools

LangSmith

MLflow

Arize

Fiddler

Job description

84.51° is seeking a Senior Manager, AI Reliability Engineering within Kroger Technology & Digital to design and lead a new discipline ensuring production-grade AI that is dependable, scalable and cost-efficient for enterprise use. You will define standards, build a charter, and guide cross‑functional teams from platform to applied AI.

You will enable reliable AI through observability, guardrails, and incident practices, own service level indicators, and partner with Model, Gateway and