Delivery Leader, Price and Promotions

Job Description

About the company

Albertsons Companies is at the forefront of the revolution in retail. With a fixation on raising the bar with innovation and building belonging through our culture, our team is rallying our company around a unique purpose: to create joy around each table and inspire a healthier tomorrow for every community.

Albertsons Companies is one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States, with over 2,200 stores in 34 states and the District of Columbia. Our well-known banners include Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw's, Acme, Tom Thumb, Randalls, United Supermarkets, Pavilions, Star Market, Haggen, Carrs, Kings Food Markets, and Balducci's Food Lovers Market. We support our stores with 22 distribution centers and 19 manufacturing plants.

Placing a premium on adaptability, safety and family well-being, our work model, Presence with a Purpose, offers a hybrid work environment between remote work and office time. A one-size-fits-all approach does not apply to everyone, and teams are empowered to make decisions best for them.

Bring your flavor

Building the future of food and well-being starts with you. Join our team and bring your best self to the table.

#bringyourflavor

#LI-MF1

What you will be doing
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 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 and advanced reasoning models.

This role is not a learn-on-the-job opportunity-the 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 integrating Generative AI (Gen AI) models with advanced reasoning capabilities-leveraging large reasoning models to power structured decision-making in pricing, promotions, and investment strategies.
• Feature engineering and data preparation techniques, ensuring AI models are trained on harmonized, structured data that aligns with real-world business needs.

The position will be based in Pleasanton, CA.

Main responsibilities

AI Strategy, Delivery & Change Adoption (70%)

• Lead the execution of AI-driven strategic initiatives, ensuring solutions move beyond research into enterprise-wide adoption.
• Partner with business leaders to drive AI adoption, ensuring solutions are trusted, explainable, and actionable by end users.
• Change adoption is a key success metric-success is measured not just by building AI solutions but by ensuring their adoption and impact within the organization.
• Navigate cross-functional groups to align AI initiatives across merchandising, operations, finance, and other divisions, ensuring AI solutions solve real business problems.
• Manage AI teams, budgets, and skill mix in a large corporate environment, ensuring the right balance of technical and strategic AI expertise.

AI Architecture & Platform Strategy (30%)

• Define the architecture of AI solutions, ensuring clarity between AI platforms, horizontal AI solutions, and business-specific AI products.
• Examples of horizontal AI solutions include:
  • Agentic architectures that power chat-based and conversational AI experiences.
  • Classification and generation solutions for text, image, and speech processing.
  • Prediction and forecasting models used across multiple business functions.
• Collaborate with AI Platform, AI Ops, Application and Cloud Engineering teams to ensure scalable AI deployment, governance, and operationalization.
• Ensure AI models are explainable, transparent, and optimized for real-world use cases, particularly in regulated, high-impact decision environments.
• Establish best practices for AI observability, model monitoring, and lifecycle management to ensure continuous optimization.

AI Strategy, Delivery & Change Adoption Details

AI-Driven Price & Promo Optimization

• Develop and operationalize AI-powered pricing, markdown, and trade investment strategies to drive real-time financial decision-making.
• Leverage large reasoning models within Gen AI to structure and optimize complex decision-making processes in pricing and promotions.
• 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 a key success metric-solutions 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, with a focus on reasoning-based AI models that enhance structured business decision-making.
• 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 models-it 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.

AI Enablement & Change Management

• Drive enterprise-wide AI adoption, ensuring that AI solutions are trusted, explainable, and actively embedded in daily operations.
• Ensure AI solutions do not operate as black-box models but as collaborative decision-support tools for merchants and finance teams.
• Build training programs and AI literacy efforts to drive sustained AI adoption and engagement.
• Serve as the bridge between AI technology, business leadership, and finance teams, ensuring AI solutions align with enterprise-wide pricing strategies.

Technical Expertise Required

AI Solution Development & Model Interpretation

• Must have built and deployed Gen AI & XAI solutions that drive real business impact.
• Hands-on experience developing inference models with SHAP, LIME, and Counterfactual Explanations.
• Strong experience evaluating model effectiveness using loss functions, calibration techniques, AUC-ROC, and precision-recall metrics.

AI Architecture & Platform Strategy

• Deep understanding of AI platform vs. horizontal AI solutions, defining clear ownership between AI CoE, AI Ops, and AI platform teams.
• Experience architecting scalable, enterprise-wide AI solutions that align with business priorities.

Data Preparedness & Standardization

• Strong expertise in exploratory data analysis (EDA), causal modeling, and data imputation techniques.
• Experience working with structured data standards (e.g., FHIR, financial data frameworks) to ensure AI models are built on harmonized, well-prepared data.

Enterprise AI Adoption & Change Management

• Ability to explain AI-driven business value to end users and ensure AI adoption is measurable and sustained.
• Change adoption is a key success metric, ensuring AI solutions are used, trusted, and embedded into business workflows.

The salary range is $ 182,400 to $ 247,800 annually. Starting salary will vary based on criteria such as location, experience, and qualifications. There may be flexibility for exceptional candidates.

What we are searching for

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, AI, Data Science, or related field preferred.
• 10+ years of 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 AI-this 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, large reasoning models, and structured AI-driven decision frameworks.
• Track record of leading AI-driven business transformation in large, complex enterprises.
• Managing team, budgets and delivery of critical initiatives.
• Strong ability to communicate AI-driven insights to non-technical stakeholders, ensuring trust and adoption.

What is it like at Albertsons?

Our 290,000 associates have a passion for great service and building lasting relationships with our customers. Through a companywide focus on innovation, we are continually enhancing our digital and product offerings, making it easy for customers to get what they need, wherever they are.

Albertsons is an Equal Opportunity Employer

This Company is an Equal Opportunity Employer, and does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, or on any other basis prohibited by law. Consistent with applicable state and local law, the Company will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.

We endeavor to make this site accessible to any and all users. If you would like to contact us regarding the accessibility of our website or need assistance completing the application process, please contact us at 1-888-255-2269(option #4).