Head of AI Reliability Engineering

84.51; Cincinnati (OH); On-site; USD 180,000 - 260,000; Full time

Job summary

84.51° is seeking a Senior Manager, AI Reliability Engineering to lead the new enterprise reliability discipline within Kroger Technology & Digital. You will define production‑grade AI standards, build a scalable reliability program, and partner with Platform, Model and Applied AI teams to ensure dependable AI systems at scale.

You will lead a cross‑functional team of engineers, set SLIs/SLAs, drive automation, and shape the roadmap to enable safe and cost‑efficient AI deployment across the

Qualifications

• 10+ years in software, platform, SRE or production engineering, including 3+ years leading teams.
• Proven track record building standards, automation or platforms that improve reliability at scale.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure (GCP/Azure), networking, automation and observability.
• Experience defining SLOs, error budgets, on-call and post-incident improvements.
• Direct experience with ML/AI in production, including handling drift and quality issues.
• Ability to influence architecture and roadmaps without direct authority.
• Excellent technical and executive communication; ability to partner with senior engineers.

Responsibilities

• Build and lead the AI Reliability Engineering discipline from 0 to 1.
• Define production‑grade AI standards, reliability metrics, cost controls and recovery plans.
• Establish operating model, roadmap, talent model and engineering culture for AI reliability.
• Embed resilience, testability, observability and safe failure modes into AI systems from architecture onward.
• Develop reliability tooling, self‑healing features, quality regressions and guardrails.
• Set service level indicators and objectives, error budgets and reliability scorecards.
• Drive cost efficiency, scalability and performance of AI workloads while reducing toil.

Skills

Kubernetes

Distributed systems

SRE

AI/ML in production

Incident management

SLOs & error budgets

Executive communication

Architecture leadership

Job description

84.51° is seeking a Senior Manager, AI Reliability Engineering to lead the new enterprise reliability discipline within Kroger Technology & Digital. You will define production‑grade AI standards, build a scalable reliability program, and partner with Platform, Model and Applied AI teams to ensure dependable AI systems at scale.

You will lead a cross‑functional team of engineers, set SLIs/SLAs, drive automation, and shape the roadmap to enable safe and cost‑efficient AI deployment across the