Senior AI Engineer

PepsiCo • Town/Village of Harrison, NY

44d

About The Position

As a Senior AI Engineer specializing in Agentic AI enablement, you will lead the design and delivery of production-grade agent capabilities built on the enterprise AI Backbone across cloud and edge environments – across supply-chain and global functions. You will own end-to-end delivery of key agent modules and integration patterns (MCP/tooling), establish strong evaluation and regression discipline, and drive adoption by partnering with transformation teams, BU, platform engineering, and enterprise application owners. You serve as a technical anchor for the workstream—translating ambiguous business workflows into measurable agent outcomes, proactively identifying risks, proposing options/tradeoffs, and ensuring solutions scale across domains.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s in CS/AI/ML or equivalent experience required
• 8+ year experience with Software life cycle
• Expertise in ML (structured and unstructured data) development and engineering
• Proven experience shipping LLM/agent solutions to production with measurable quality and operational practices.
• Advanced Software Engineering: Python (and Java) mastery with distributed systems expertise; performance optimization (profiling, parallelization); architecture patterns (e.g., FastAPI, asyncio, Pydantic)
• LLM & Agent Systems: Multi-agent orchestration (e.g., LangChain, LangGraph, CrewAI); advanced prompt engineering; custom agent memory architectures; model optimization techniques
• Evaluation Framework Development: Statistical evaluation design (confidence intervals, power analysis); benchmark creation; instrumentation frameworks (e.g., MLflow, Arise); regression testing systems
• ML Operations: Production deployment pipelines (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes, Ray); model registry management; scaled inference optimization; GPU utilization optimization
• Enterprise Integration: Enterprise connector development; scalable API architectures; data pipeline engineering (e.g., Kafka, gRPC, Redis); authorization protocol implementation
• Observability Engineering: Telemetry system design (e.g., Prometheus, OpenTelemetry); automated anomaly detection; distributed tracing; performance dashboarding (e.g., Grafana)
• System Architecture: Microservice design patterns; high-throughput event processing; fault-tolerance implementation; horizontal scaling architectures
• Technical Leadership: Architecture governance systems; engineering standards development; build-vs-buy evaluation frameworks; technical roadmap creation
• Ownership: drives outcomes end-to-end for a workstream area (not just tasks)
• Collaboration & customer focus: influences stakeholders to deliver workflow value and adoption
• Communication & adaptability: executive-ready clarity on progress, risks, and evaluation evidence
• Proactiveness & initiative anticipates constraints, proposes options/tradeoffs early
• Strategic thinking: contributes to roadmap sequencing and reusable patterns across domains
• Demonstrates proven history of creating solutions with order-of-magnitude improvements over standard approaches
• Possesses rare combination of deep technical expertise and strategic business understanding
• Creates solutions that scale beyond their direct involvement (leveraged impact)
• Consistently elevates the performance of teams and individuals around them
• Identifies and solves problems others haven't recognized yet
• Maintains extraordinary productivity while ensuring knowledge transfer
• Balances technical perfectionism with pragmatic business value
• Communicates complex technical concepts effectively to both technical and non-technical stakeholders

Nice To Haves

• Master’s preferred
• Full-stack dev experience on modern stack
• Modelling User Interactions with AI Systems; Modeling multi-agent behaviour loops with tools like Temporal
• Agentic memory Patterns and usage with tools like MEM0 and Temporal
• Experience with Agentic RAG; Domain level Semantic Layer Designs with Graph and Vector DBs

Responsibilities

• Design and architect transformative agent systems that enable organization-wide scaling, establishing new paradigms in agent architecture that become company standards.
• Pioneer novel agent patterns (tool-use orchestration, multi-agent systems, advanced memory architectures) that dramatically improve performance across the enterprise.
• Transform ambiguous business problems into elegant technical solutions with 10x efficiency gains through innovative approaches to system design.
• Optimize critical performance metrics beyond standard benchmarks, creating breakthrough improvements (90th percentile latency reduction, 50%+ token efficiency, near-perfect tool-call reliability).
• Establish architectural governance that propagates excellence across teams and projects.
• Design scientifically rigorous evaluation frameworks that uncover non-obvious failure modes and edge cases others miss.
• Create organization-level evaluation standards and platforms that scale across multiple teams and projects.
• Innovate on automated testing methodologies that dramatically increase code quality while reducing QA overhead.
• Perform sophisticated statistical analysis of system behaviors to predict quality issues before they manifest.
• Establish early warning systems for emerging failure patterns.
• Architect intelligent routing systems that autonomously optimize for cost, latency, and quality trade-offs.
• Pioneer novel approaches to model selection, fine-tuning, and prompt engineering that set new performance standards.
• Create optimization algorithms that continuously improve routing decisions based on real-time feedback loops.
• Develop proprietary techniques for model evaluation that provide competitive advantage.
• Design scalable integration architectures that become enterprise standards for AI/app connectivity.
• Create abstraction layers that dramatically simplify how teams connect AI capabilities to enterprise systems.
• Establish next-generation integration patterns that anticipate future technology directions and enable seamless adoption.
• Develop tooling that accelerates integration velocity across the entire organization.
• Serve as technical visionary, elevating the entire AI organization's capabilities through knowledge transfer and mentorship.
• Anticipate industry shifts and position the organization to capitalize on emerging technological opportunities.
• Create internal communities of practice that accelerate knowledge sharing and collective innovation.
• Represent the company's technical excellence externally through publications, speaking engagements, and industry contributions.
• Drive cross-functional initiatives that break down silos and create new organizational capabilities.

Benefits

• Bonus based on performance and eligibility target payout is 12% of annual salary paid out annually.
• Paid time off subject to eligibility, including paid parental leave, vacation, sick, and bereavement.
• Medical, Dental, Vision, Disability, Health, and Dependent Care Reimbursement Accounts, Employee Assistance Program (EAP), Insurance (Accident, Group Legal, Life), Defined Contribution Retirement Plan.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior