Principal Software Engineer

Your Impact

As a Principal Software Engineer with a focus on Digital AI/ML applications, you will shape the future of intelligent retail technology by driving innovation in artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions. This role will design, implement, and deliver cross-functional, AI-powered solutions to address highly complex challenges. You will provide technical leadership, guide the adoption of advanced AI/ML systems, and cultivate an engineering culture that emphasizes data-driven decision-making, scalability, and continuous learning.

What You Will Do

• AI/ML Solution Leadership: Define and execute the technical strategy for AI/ML-driven retail technologies in alignment with business objectives, working closely with senior leadership.

• Problem Solving with AI: Identify challenging problems faced by customers, engineers, and business leaders, and design intelligent, data-driven solutions leveraging machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and recommendation systems.

• Scalable Architecture: Decompose complex AI/ML problems into modular, scalable solutions that evolve with emerging technologies and enterprise needs.

• Deployment & Integration: Partner with product owners and stakeholders to ensure seamless deployment and adoption of AI/ML systems, integrating models into production environments with low latency, resilience, and observability.

• Tradeoff Analysis: Evaluate and balance tradeoffs in AI/ML system design—accuracy vs. performance, automation vs. human oversight, cost-effectiveness vs. innovation—to deliver business value.

• Software Engineering Excellence: Champion modern software and MLOps methodologies, including continuous training, automated deployment pipelines, model monitoring, and performance tuning.

• Technical Depth: Provide leadership in AI/ML system design, ensuring high-quality architectures and secure, ethical use of data. Dive deep into complex system issues, performing root cause analysis for production challenges.

• Testing & Reliability: Implement robust testing strategies for ML models and applications, including unit tests, regression suites, A/B testing, model validation, and bias/fairness evaluation.

• Optimization & Documentation: Continuously monitor and optimize AI/ML applications for accuracy, latency, and user experience while maintaining comprehensive documentation of models, features, and processes.

• Innovation Culture: Foster a culture of experimentation, structured problem-solving, and adoption of state-of-the-art AI/ML technologies. Stay ahead of global trends in AI research and best practices.

• Open Source Engagement: Explore and adopt open-source AI frameworks, contributing back to the community where possible.

• Operational Excellence: Minimize operational overhead by ensuring dashboards, monitoring, alerts, and runbooks are AI/ML-aware and well-maintained.

• Mentorship & Leadership: Mentor engineers in AI/ML best practices, architecture, and implementation, providing high-quality code, reusable libraries, and frameworks as exemplars.

Required Qualifications

• 10 years of experience in software development or related field

• 8 years of experience in any of the following: software engineering competencies—frontend technologies (UI/UX), middleware (microservices and APIs), database technologies, DevOps

• 8 years of experience working on project(s) involving the implementation of solutions applying development life cycles (SDLC)

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, computer information systems (CIS), or related field (or equivalent work experience in lieu of degree)

Preferred Skills / Education

• Master’s degree in computer science, CIS, or related field

• 8 years of experience building scalable AI/ML applications on google cloud or similar cloud platforms

• 8 years of experience with four or more of the following: CI/CD tools, distributed systems, database technologies, VertexAI, or AI/ML frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, Scikit-learn, etc.)

• 8 years of experience in systems analysis, defining technical requirements, and performing high-level design for complex AI/ML solutions

• 6 years of experience applying IT Infrastructure Library frameworks with AI/ML system operations

• 6 years of experience leading engineering teams, with or without direct reports

About Lowe's

Lowe’s is a FORTUNE® 100 home improvement company serving approximately 16 million customer transactions a week in the United States. With total fiscal year 2024 sales of more than $83 billio