Senior Director Data and AI/ML Engineering

What You Need To Know

Open the door to a groundbreaking tech career with an industry leader. Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits is North America’s preeminent wine and spirits distributor, as well as a family-owned, privately held company with a 50+ year legacy of success. To create a new era in alcohol beverage sales and service, we’re heavily invested in the most transformative new technologies – and the most brilliant tech professionals. Southern Glazer’s was named by Newsweek as a Most Loved Workplace and is included on the Forbes lists for Largest Private Companies and Best Employers for Diversity.

As a full-time employee, you can choose from a full menu of our Top Shelf Benefits, including comprehensive medical and prescription drug coverage, dental and vision plans, tax-saving Flexible Spending Accounts, disability coverage, life insurance plans, and a 401(k) plan. We also offer tuition reimbursement, a wellness program, parental leave, vacation accrual, paid sick leave, and more.

We offer continuous learning and career growth in a fast-paced environment where you are respected, your voice is heard, and technology is part of our strategy for success. If you’re looking to fill your glass with opportunity, come join our FAMILY.

Overview

Southern Glazers Wines and Spirits is a data-centric company where critical decisions are made based on data. The completeness, accuracy and timeliness of data has huge implications to our business. The data and AI-ML Engineering team is responsible for providing strategic leadership and direction in the development, implementation, and optimization of Enterprise Data Strategy, Artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and automation initiatives within the organization. This team requires a seasoned leader with a strong background in technology, data, and business strategy to drive innovation and efficiency across various business functions within SGWS.

As a senior leader reporting into VP Data Platforms and Services, you will play a crucial role in driving the development and implementation of Enterprise Data Strategy, Responsible AI and Machine learning strategies within the organization. This position requires a deep understanding of Data, AI-ML technologies, strong leadership skills, and the ability to collaborate with cross-functional teams, including the Data-COE, to deliver innovative solutions. The Senior Director – Data and AI/ML Engineering, will be responsible for overseeing the Data Transformation/AI-ML initiatives, ensuring alignment with business goals, and staying abreast of industry trends, and will ensure that technology and automation practices comply with relevant regulations and ethical standards

Primary Responsibilities

• Lead and manage a high-performing team of data analysts, data/semantic modelers, data engineers, machine learning engineers, and automation specialists.
• Oversee the development, testing, and deployment of Data, Semantic, AI-ML models and automation solutions.
• Establish and enforce data governance policies by collaborating with Data COE teams to safeguard the quality, accuracy, and security of data used in AI-ML and automation processes while ensuring the data infrastructure supports AI-ML initiatives.
• Define and track key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the efficacy/impact of Data Transformation/AI-ML and automation initiatives while presenting on the progress and outcomes of key projects to leadership.
• Ensure that AI/ML and automation practices comply with relevant regulations and ethical standards through staying informed about legal considerations in AI-ML, advocating for responsible and transparent practices (Responsible AI).
• Lead a sizable growing organization focused on productizing generative AI features.
• Define, Grow and hire key IC and people leaders to scale up the Data, AI-ML Engineering teams.
• Lead the planning and delivery of features across various workstreams in close partnership with product management, Data COE, program management and various other stakeholders.
• Define and implement a predictable execution framework.
• Lead the team successfully through the challenges of a matrixed organization.
• Engage deeply with the architecture team and lead on architecture, data flows, API design.
• Drive headcount strategy for your organization with multiple centers of excellence and scale the team to effectively deploy and maintain services round the clock.
• Build out and articulate the technical roadmap and execution cadence that ensures predictable software delivery at a high quality.
• Be accountable for scaling the data/AI-ML services to support the needs of various apps/surfaces across multiple modalities (image, video, audio, 3d, etc.
• Be player coach to a group of technical leaders.

Minimum Qualifications

• A minimum of fifteen years of software industry experience.
• At least five years of senior leadership experience, leading teams of 50+.
• Experience building and shipping Data, AI products at scale.
• Understanding of data design & modeling principles as well as architecture patterns such as data lake, lakehouse, data mart, data fabric and data mesh 
• Expertise in one or more data processing frameworks such as Spark/PySpark, Flink, NOSQL databases etc. as well as experience with stream processing using Kafka is mandatory 
• Experience with Semantic technologies, modeling, and related concepts such as controlled vocabularies, ontologies as well as taxonomies 
• Understanding of Open/Linked data media types such as Turtle, JSON-LD 
• Experience with Graph databases such Property Graphs (Neo4J, Datastax Graph) or Semantic/Knowledge Graphs (AWS Neptune) as well as graph processing languages such as Gremlin, Cypher and SparQL is a huge plus
• A deep understanding of AI-ML, including ML frameworks such as MLFlow, public cloud and commercial AI-ML solutions.
• Knowledge of data mining, statistical modeling, and machine learning methodologies.
• Experience in applying ML techniques in retail distribution space is a major plus.
• Experience with data visualization and presentation, familiar with data analysis tools such as Tableau, Looker.
• Designing, developing, and maintaining software systems that are integral to the deployment and functioning of Large Language Models and Generative AI.
• Knowledge of optimization and operation of GPU intensive ML workloads in production environments.
• Understanding of model serving, orchestration, scaling and GPU resource management.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills – building strong relationships with internal stakeholders and external partners.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to think strategically and make data-driven decisions.
• A passion for staying up to date with the latest trends and technologies in the Data, AI-ML space.
• A Bachelor, Master or PhD. in Computer Science, Computer Vision, or a related field, or equivalent industry experience

Physical Demands

• Physical demands include a considerable amount of time sitting and typing/keyboarding, using a computer (e.g., keyboard, mouse, and monitor), or adding machine
• Physical demands with activity or condition may include walking, bending, reaching, standing, squatting, and stooping
• May require occasional lifting/lowering, pushing, carrying, or pulling up to 20lbs

EEO Statement

Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, an Affirmative Action/EEO employer, prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type and provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.  Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits provides competitive compensation based on estimated performance level consistent with the past relevant experience, knowledge, skills, abilities and education of employees.  Unless otherwise expressly stated, any pay ranges posted here are estimates from outside of Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits and do not reflect Southern Glazer’s pay bands or ranges.