Lead Software Engineer – AI/RAG Platform

Floor & Decor is a leading retailer in the home improvement sector, and they are seeking a Lead Software Engineer for their AI/RAG Platform. The role involves providing technical leadership for developing and maintaining solutions on the ServiceNow platform, focusing on AI applications and integrations with retail systems.

Responsibilities:

• Architect, develop, and continuously improve a production RAG agent built on Azure OpenAI — including chunking strategies, vector indexing, retrieval ranking, and prompt engineering
• Lead full-stack development across an Angular front end and a Python-based service and LLMOps layer
• Design and maintain MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations with inventory and merchandising systems to ground AI responses in live operational data
• Own the model evaluation pipeline using Ragas to track faithfulness, answer relevance, and context precision metrics across releases
• Make architectural decisions for reliability, scalability, and observability of all AI services deployed in Azure
• Lead, mentor, and conduct code reviews for a team of software engineers, fostering a culture of quality and continuous learning
• Work closely with product managers and business stakeholders to understand associate pain points, translate them into technical requirements, and prioritize the backlog
• Champion agile practices — participate in sprint planning, retrospectives, and daily stand-ups as a senior voice on the team
• Communicate technical trade-offs and architectural decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Evaluate emerging LLM capabilities, tooling, and Azure OpenAI updates; recommend and prototype improvements to keep the platform current
• Establish and maintain engineering best practices including CI/CD pipelines, code quality standards, and security practices for AI workloads
• Troubleshoot and resolve complex issues in retrieval quality, LLM hallucination, latency, and integration reliability

Requirements:

• 7–10 years of professional software engineering experience, with increasing scope and ownership
• Hands-on experience designing and deploying 2–5 production RAG agents or AI-powered applications
• Proficiency in Python for backend services and LLM orchestration (LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or similar frameworks)
• Working knowledge of Angular or comparable modern front-end frameworks
• Demonstrated experience with Azure OpenAI services — including LLM APIs, Azure AI Search (vector/index), and associated Azure infrastructure
• Experience with service-based and microservice architectures, RESTful API design, and async service communication
• Familiarity with MCP or other tool-calling/function-calling patterns for LLM-to-system integrations
• Experience with cloud environments (Azure preferred) including compute, storage, networking, and IAM fundamentals
• Practical knowledge of agile/scrum methodologies — sprint ceremonies, story estimation, backlog grooming
• Experience with Ragas or other LLM evaluation frameworks (RAGAS, ROUGE, G-Eval, etc.)
• Familiarity with retail systems — POS, OMS, inventory/merchandising platforms
• Exposure to LLMOps tooling such as MLflow, Weights & Biases, or Azure ML
• Prior experience in a Center of Excellence or innovation-focused team within a larger enterprise