Sr. Manager, AI & Automation

Foot Locker•,

1d•$160,000 - $190,000•Remote

About The Position

Foot Locker, Inc. is seeking a technology leader to build and run the engineering team responsible for delivering Generative AI, Agentic AI, and intelligent automation products across the retail enterprise. The role owns delivery, reliability, governance, and cost for the AI and automation portfolio, translating enterprise AI strategy into production capabilities for Merchandising, Supply Chain, Stores, Digital Commerce, Finance, Customer, and Corporate functions. The Sr. Manager leads AI and automation engineers, senior engineers, and contract resources; establishes the team’s operating model, hiring plan, and engineering standards; and is accountable for what the team ships. The role owns portfolio outcomes, talent, and operational health, sets priorities with product and business partners, and makes staffing, sequencing, and build-versus-buy decisions within enterprise architecture standards set by the Sr. Architect, AI & Automation. The role is 100% remote and US-based.

Requirements

7 or more years of experience in software engineering, data engineering, applied AI, automation, or related technology areas.
3 or more years of direct people leadership, including hiring, coaching, performance management, and developing engineers across levels.
Demonstrated track record of delivering production technology products at enterprise scale, rather than proofs of concept.
Working technical depth in Generative AI, LLMs, Agentic AI, RAG, embeddings, vector search, prompt engineering, and AI orchestration sufficient to lead design reviews, challenge technical choices, and earn senior engineers’ trust.
Familiarity with Python, SQL, REST APIs, cloud architecture, and modern data platforms such as Snowflake and Databricks.
Experience with LLMOps, CI/CD, evaluation frameworks, AI observability, and production monitoring.
Strong understanding of Responsible AI, data governance, security, privacy, RBAC, and regulatory compliance in an enterprise environment.
Proven ability to own a budget, vendor relationships, consumption forecasting, and cost management for a technology portfolio.
Experience leading distributed and blended teams, including onshore, offshore, and contract resources.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to influence engineering teams, business stakeholders, directors, and executive leadership.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field, and 7 or more years of related experience and/or training, or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
Ability to communicate clearly, interpret different forms of communication, write management reports and professional correspondence, and speak effectively to peers, management, customers, and other associates.
Ability to plan and execute unusual and difficult work, take initiative, make timely decisions, solve practical and impractical problems, interpret varied instructions, and deal constructively with conflict and disagreement.
High motivation, exceptional attention to detail, ability to derive answers from communications across multiple parts of the business, ability to work well within a team, and flexibility to support varied department goals.

Nice To Haves

Experience in Retail, Digital Commerce, Supply Chain, or Customer Analytics domains.
Experience working in Agile product delivery environments.
Experience with Azure OpenAI, Snowflake Cortex AI, Databricks, the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem, Power BI/Fabric, AI gateways, and Model Context Protocol (MCP), or equivalent technologies.
Experience establishing a new AI or automation capability from its initial team through sustained production operation.
Experience managing managers or technical leads.
Public cloud experience, preferably Azure or AWS.
Previous experience at a Fortune 500 company.
Comfort operating amid ambiguity and setting direction before standards are fully defined.

Responsibilities

Hire, coach, and develop AI and automation engineers; set expectations, conduct performance and career conversations, and build a durable team bench across levels.
Own the roadmap, commitments, and end-to-end delivery of AI agents, RAG solutions, automation workflows, APIs, and enterprise integrations.
Define how work enters the team, how it is prioritized, and how capacity is allocated across PODs, business domains, and shared platform work.
Establish and enforce standards for code quality, testing, evaluation, documentation, security, observability, and operational readiness.
Own reliability, incident response, service levels, and remediation for AI and automation solutions in production.
Require measurable evaluation of AI capabilities before and after release, covering groundedness, retrieval quality, task success, latency, and cost per task.
Forecast and manage token, compute, platform, and licensing spend, and drive unit-cost improvement as usage scales.
Operationalize Responsible AI, security, privacy, PII protection, RBAC, model and prompt governance, and audit readiness with Security, Legal, and Risk.
Translate enterprise AI reference architectures and guardrails into implementations and feed production learning back into standards.
Partner with business and product leaders to shape demand, define measurable outcomes, and communicate trade-offs, sequencing, and capacity realities.
Evaluate AI platforms, models, and vendors; manage contracts, renewals, consumption commitments, and partner performance.
Drive reusable services, agents, skills, connectors, and accelerators to reduce the cost of delivering subsequent use cases.
Report portfolio health, risk, adoption, and value realization to directors and executive leadership.
Set team priorities and make staffing, sequencing, and build-versus-buy decisions within enterprise architecture standards.
Provide direct supervision, including hiring, onboarding, goal setting, coaching, performance management, career development, and resource planning for engineers, senior engineers, and contract resources.