Staff AI Full-Stack Engineer (Remote)

KOHLS; Menomonee Falls (WI); Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

KOHLS is seeking a Staff AI Software Engineer to join a cross-functional team focused on advancing retail experiences. You will design modular AI backend services, orchestration workflows, and secure gateways while mentoring engineers and promoting XP practices.

You will collaborate with Applied/Data Science for LLM optimization, instrument tracing, and telemetry, delivering enterprise-grade AI solutions that scale with enterprise data and APIs.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building and scaling production applications with foundation models, RAG, or agentic workflows.
• 6+ years integrating AI apps securely with enterprise data, APIs, and identity/access controls.
• 4+ years evaluating AI app quality, latency, reliability, and cost.
• Experience with major cloud platforms (GCP, AWS or Azure).
• Experience with CI/CD and test-driven development.

Responsibilities

• Lead development of high-quality, observable applications using XP and a user-centric approach.
• Navigate the full application lifecycle with designers, PMs, and engineers on the product team.
• Drive data-informed decisions to implement desired business outcomes.
• Establish and lead product engineering and software standards and elevate them.
• Mentor junior team members and create teachable moments.
• Contribute to culture by modeling partnership, collaboration and feedback.
• Champion XP practices and tailor them for effectiveness within the team.

Skills

Software development

Prioritization

Cloud platforms

Performance tuning

CI/CD

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree in MIS/CS or related field

Tools

LangChain

AutoGen

CrewAI

Job description

About the Role

As Staff Software Engineer, you will be part of a dynamic, cross-functional team dedicated to enhancing the customer experience. You will collaborate closely with Design, Product Management, and Engineering experts to tackle real-world challenges and deliver innovative solutions that elevate our retail offerings.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the development of high-quality applications that are robust, observable and measurable. Using extreme programming (XP) practices and a user-centric approach
• Navigate the entire application lifecycle in collaboration with designers, product managers, and other engineers on the product team
• Leverage critical thinking, lead lean experimentation and influence decisions backed by data and industry best practices to implement desired business outcomes
• Establish and lead product engineering and software standards and continuously elevate existing standards using the new ones in the industry
• Mentor junior team members in pairing sessions, one-on-ones and ad-hoc as the need arises, and create teachable moments
• Contribute to cultural transformation by modeling partnership, collaboration, and technical initiatives and giving and receiving feedback regularly both within the team and across the organization
• Champion XP practice and knows when to customize it for effectiveness and also engages in conversations around practice, processes and community
• Additional tasks may be assigned

Addendum

STAFF AI SOFTWARE ENGINEER

• Design and build modular, headless AI backend services, advanced RAG architectures, and multi-agent orchestration workflows (e.g., LangChain, AutoGen, CrewAI).
• Construct enterprise-grade Model Context Protocol (MCP) gateways, Application Programming Interface (API) integration/mediation layers, rate limiters, and security proxies that allow autonomous agents to safely read and write to enterprise systems.
• Develop lightweight, streaming simulation frontends(“Dry-Run” interfaces) solely to validate agent behaviors, prompt strategies, and human-in-the-loop workflows during pilot discovery.
• Collaborate with Applied/Data Science and Machine Learning specialists to fine-tune Small Language Models (SLMs), execute weight quantization (AWQ/GPTQ), and optimize GPU memory utilization for high-throughput inference.
• Instrument distributed tracing, token utilization logging, and inference latency telemetry across the AI stack.
• Package reusable code libraries, containerized microservices, and integration SDKs for domain delivery and implementation teams.
• Architect resilient Compound AI Systems that orchestrate dynamic routing between deterministic APIs, specialized SLMs, and frontier LLMs.

Requirements

• 6+ years of demonstrated experience building and scaling production applications using foundation models, RAG, or agentic workflows
• 6+ years of experience integrating AI applications securely with enterprise data, APIs, and identity/access controls
• 4+ years of experience evaluating and optimizing AI application quality, latency, reliability, and cost

What Skills You Have

Required

• 6+ years of experience in software development
• Proven ability to manage multiple competing priorities
• Advanced knowledge of application design patterns, event-driven architecture, database schemas, and testing strategies
• Experience with large-scale application troubleshooting and performance tuning
• Demonstrated experience working with major cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, or Azure)
• Knowledge and experience with continuous integration, continuous deployment, and test-driven development

Preferred

• Bachelor’s Degree or equivalent in MIS, Computer Science or related field
• Familiarity and experie