Job Description

About Albertsons Companies India
Albertsons Companies is a leading food and drug retailer in the United States. As of February 22, 2025, the Company operated 2,270 retail stores with 1,728 in-store pharmacies, 405 associated fuel centers, 22 dedicated distribution centers and 19 manufacturing facilities. Albertsons Companies India is a vital extension of the Albertsons Companies Inc. workforce and important to the next phase in the company & technology journey to support millions of customers & lives every day.

Position Title: Director Engineering
:
Overview:
We are seeking a highly experienced AI leader to drive the execution, adoption, and integration of AI-driven solutions that optimize price and promotional investment decisions at scale.
This role is not a learn-on-the-job opportunitythe ideal candidate must have hands-on expertise in:
Building and deploying Explainable AI (XAI) solutions that ensure AI-driven decisions are interpretable and trusted.
Developing and fine-tuning Generative AI (Gen AI) models that power business-critical decision-making.
Feature engineering and data preparation techniques, ensuring AI models are trained on harmonized, structured data that aligns with real-world business needs.
This is a delivery-focused AI leadership role, ensuring that AI solutions are actionable, explainable, and embedded into enterprise decision-making. The focus is not on AI platform development but on optimizing price and promotional investment strategies through AI-driven insights.
Key Responsibilities:
AI-Driven Price & Promo Optimization:

• Develop and operationalize AI-powered pricing, markdown, and trade investment strategies to drive real-time financial decision-making.
• Design and deploy XAI & Gen AI solutions that provide clear, explainable recommendations for merchants, finance, and investment teams.
• Ensure AI models align with price and promo strategies, optimizing trade investment allocation, promotional effectiveness, and ROI maximization.
• Develop counterfactual simulations to test multiple pricing and investment scenarios before execution.

AI Adoption & Business Integration:

• AI adoption is the key success metricsolutions must be trusted, embedded, and actively used in merchant and finance workflows.
• Work across merchants, finance teams, national groups, and technology teams to align AI-driven pricing strategies with business priorities.
• Ensure AI-driven recommendations are interpretable and actionable, allowing non-technical stakeholders to make data-driven investment decisions with confidence.
• Serve as the AI enabler by translating technical AI models into business-ready insights that are easy to understand and apply.

AI Solution Development, XAI & Model Effectiveness:

• Hands-on expertise in building, deploying, and scaling Explainable AI (XAI) solutions to ensure AI-driven decisions are transparent and actionable.
• Extensive experience in Generative AI (Gen AI) model development and fine-tuning, ensuring AI models support structured business reasoning and pricing optimization.
• Expert in model interpretability techniques such as SHAP, LIME, and Counterfactual Explanations, ensuring users can trust and act on AI recommendations.
• Deep knowledge of AI model evaluation and effectiveness metrics, including AUC-ROC, precision-recall, calibration techniques, and loss functions tied to financial impact.
• This role requires previous hands-on work developing AI modelsit is not for those looking to gain experience in XAI or Gen AI on the job.

Advanced Feature Engineering & Data Preparation:

• Proven hands-on experience in feature engineering and structured data preparation to ensure AI models capture the right business drivers.
• Expertise in causal modeling, counterfactual analysis, and data imputation techniques, ensuring robust, high-quality training data.
• Lead exploratory data analysis (EDA) efforts to uncover patterns that drive price and investment optimization.
• Strong understanding of financial and retail data frameworks, ensuring AI models align with profitability, margin optimization, and competitive positioning.

Scalable AI Deployment, Governance & AI Ops:

• Collaborate with AI Platform, AI Ops, and Cloud Engineering teams to ensure scalable AI deployment, governance, and operationalization.
• Ensure AI models are production-ready, resilient, and compliant with enterprise AI governance standards.
• Work with AI infrastructure teams to optimize model performance, inference speed, and cost efficiency across cloud and on-prem environments.
• Develop best practices for AI monitoring, retraining pipelines, and bias detection, ensuring continuous AI model improvement.

Qualifications:

• Experience in AI/ML, data science, and AI-driven decision optimization, with at least 5 years in leadership roles.
• Proven, hands-on expertise in XAI & Gen AIthis is not a learn-on-the-job role.
• Hands-on experience with explainability techniques (SHAP, LIME, Counterfactuals) and model effectiveness methodologies (AUC-ROC, loss functions, calibration techniques).
• Extensive hands-on experience in feature engineering, structured data preparation, and causal modeling.
• Experience beyond LLMs, with exposure to deep research models, reasoning-based AI, or structured AI-driven decision frameworks.
• Track record of leading AI-driven business transformation in large, complex enterprises.
• Strong ability to communicate AI-driven insights to non-technical stakeholders, ensuring trust and adoption.
• Masters or PhD in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, or related field preferred.

Skills Required