Sr. Manager, AI & Automation

Overview Great brands reflect culture. The best ones help shape it. At Foot Locker, we’re rooted in sport, powered by style, and driven by the communities that move both. From Foot Locker and Kids Foot Locker to Champs Sports, WSS, and atmos, our brands sit at the intersection of sport, style, and self-expression.

As part of the DICK’S Sporting Goods family, you’re backed by the resources, reach, and career opportunities of a world-class sports company. That unleashes Foot Locker to keep pushing forward with the agility and edge that define the brand. We’re looking for great people who want to influence culture and the generation that is shaping what’s next.

Whether you’re building strategy, shaping innovations, or creating unforgettable customer moments, you’ll contribute to decisions and experiences that define our brands’ impact in the communities we serve.

Come change the game with us. Apply today!

This Role is 100% REMOTE, US Based At this time, Foot Locker will not sponsor a new applicant for employment authorization, or offer any immigration related support for this position (i.e. H1B, F-1 OPT, F-1 STEM OPT, F-1 CPT, J-1, TN, or another type of work authorization. Foot Locker, Inc. is seeking an experienced technology leader to serve as Sr. Manager, AI & Automation , accountable for building and running the engineering team that delivers Generative AI, Agentic AI, and intelligent automation products across the retail enterprise. This leader owns the delivery, reliability, governance, and cost of the AI and automation portfolio, and partners with architecture, data, product, and business leaders to convert enterprise AI strategy into production capabilities that serve Merchandising, Supply Chain, Stores, Digital Commerce, Finance, Customer, and Corporate functions.

The Sr. Manager leads a team of engineers, senior engineers, and contract resources; sets the operating model, hiring plan, and engineering standards for the group; and is the accountable owner for what the team ships. AI products delivered by this team are used every day by store, merchandising, supply chain, digital commerce, and corporate teams across Foot Locker’s brands and digital channels.

Responsibilities Scope of the role: owns the people, delivery, and operating model for the AI & Automation engineering team. Accountable for portfolio outcomes, talent, and operational health rather than for any single system. Sets priorities with product and business partners, and makes staffing, sequencing, and build-versus-buy calls within the enterprise architecture standards set by the Sr. Architect, AI & Automation.

Responsibilities This role will include, but will not be limited to the following responsibilities:

• People leadership: hire, coach, and develop a team of AI and automation engineers; set expectations, run performance and career conversations, and build a durable bench across levels
• Delivery ownership: own the roadmap, commitments, and end-to-end delivery of AI agents, RAG solutions, automation workflows, APIs, and enterprise integrations
• Operating model: define how work enters the team, how it is prioritized, and how capacity is allocated across PODs, business domains, and shared platform work
• Engineering standards: establish and enforce standards for code quality, testing, evaluation, documentation, security, observability, and operational readiness
• Production accountability: own reliability, incident response, service levels, and remediation for AI and automation solutions in production
• Evaluation and quality: require measurable evaluation of every AI capability before and after release, including groundedness, retrieval quality, task success, latency, and cost per task
• Cost and consumption management: forecast and manage token, compute, platform, and licensing spend; drive unit-cost improvement as usage scales
• Governance and risk: operationalize Responsible AI, security, privacy, PII protection, RBAC, model and prompt governance, and audit readiness in partnership with Security, Legal, and Risk
• Architecture partnership: translate enterprise AI reference architectures and guardrails into delivered implementations, and feed production learning back into the standards
• Business partnership: work directly with business and product leaders to shape demand, define measurable outcomes, and communicate trade-offs, sequencing, and capacity reali…