IT AI ENGINEER

Sally Beauty Holdings • Plano, TX

10h • Hybrid

About The Position

At SBH, our purpose is to inspire a more colorful, confident, and welcoming world. We are the leader in professional hair color, selling and distributing professional beauty supplies across 11 countries through our Sally Beauty and Beauty Systems Group businesses. Sally Beauty offers products for hair color, hair care, nails, and skin care to retail customers looking for salon quality products at a value price. Beauty Systems Group, branded as Cosmo Prof or Armstrong McCall stores, along with its direct sales consultants, sell professionally branded products intended for use and resale by salons to retail consumers. You will work within our enterprise AI governance framework — collaborating with business stakeholders, data engineers, and platform teams — to deliver scalable, secure, and production-ready AI applications. From LLM-powered workflows to agentic automation pipelines, you will play a pivotal role in shaping how Sally Beauty leverages generative AI.

Requirements

• 3+ years in software engineering or data science, with at least 1 year in AI/ML engineering or applied generative AI development.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Data Science, Engineering, or a related technical field required.
• Proficiency in designing and deploying LLM-powered solutions including fine-tuning, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agentic frameworks such as LangChain, AutoGen, or CrewAI.
• Hands-on experience with Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, and AKS-based deployments for AI workloads. Familiarity with Azure Entra ID, Key Vault, and Managed Identity for secure AI service integration.
• Strong programming skills in Python including FastAPI, Pydantic, and asyncio. Experience with REST API design, JSON schema modeling, SQL, and Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform or Bicep.
• Working knowledge of vector databases such as Qdrant, pgvector, or Weaviate and their role in semantic search and RAG architectures.
• Experience with model evaluation, A/B testing, and drift detection to maintain production model quality over time.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD practices using GitHub Actions and ArgoCD for deploying AI services in containerized environments.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders. Self-directed, ownership-oriented, and effective in cross-functional team settings.

Nice To Haves

• Hands-on experience building production LLM applications with structured outputs, tool/function calling, and multi-agent orchestration patterns.
• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) server design patterns and building context-aware AI tool integrations.
• Prior experience in retail, CPG, or large-scale enterprise environments where AI outcomes directly impact store operations or customer experience.
• Understanding of responsible AI frameworks, AI risk management, and enterprise AI SDLC governance practices including audit trails and policy enforcement.
• Experience with AI-assisted developer tooling such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or Gemini CLI for accelerated development workflows.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and deploy AI/ML models and generative AI solutions into production environments using Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, and AKS-based microservice architectures.
• Build and maintain LLM-powered applications including prompt engineering frameworks, RAG pipelines, agent orchestration, and MCP (Model Context Protocol) server integrations.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to translate business requirements into AI proof-of-concept (POC) builds and production-ready features, including tooling for marketing, supply chain, and retail operations.
• Develop and maintain CI/CD pipelines for AI workloads using GitHub Actions and ArgoCD, adhering to enterprise AI governance, security, and SDLC standards.
• Implement responsible AI practices including model evaluation, bias detection, hallucination mitigation, observability, and audit logging across all AI services.
• Partner with security and infrastructure teams to ensure AI systems comply with Zero Trust principles, data privacy requirements, and enterprise identity standards via Entra ID and Azure Key Vault.
• Contribute to internal AI sandbox environments, enabling both professional and citizen developers to experiment with generative AI tools safely and within governance guardrails.
• Document AI solution architectures, API contracts, and integration patterns; present findings and recommendations to cross-functional teams and leadership.

Benefits

• competitive salary
• outstanding benefits package that includes medical, dental, vision, life Insurance, paid vacation and sick days, paid holidays, tuition reimbursement and 401(k) with company match.
• in-house salon with complementary services
• varied selection of food options at our corporate campus.
• Sally Beauty and CosmoProf Professional onsite store, where associates enjoy a great merchandise discount!

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Number of Employees: 5,001-10,000 employees