AI Platform Engineer Minneapolis-St. Paul-Bloomington, Minnesota

Salary Range: $115,000 To $135,000 Annually

As part of the talented and driven technology team, the AI Platform Engineer will design and implement cloud-based AI solutions that power Great Clips' products and operations. Partnering closely across engineering, data, and product, you'll build robust AI services, optimize pipelines, and accelerate the adoption of responsible AI to achieve business outcomes. You'll keep up with the latest AI and platform trends to promote continuous improvement, scaling solutions from concept to production. The AI Engineer is a hands-on builder who understands business and technology and advocates for pragmatic, secure AI solutions aligned to our mission, vision, and goals.

Your Mission

On your journey, you will face challenges such as:

• Designing and delivering cloud AI solutions-building cloud based APIs, microservices, and event-driven components that integrate models with Great Clips platforms, data, documents and products.
• Evaluate AI platforms-Evaluate and recommend AI platform providers and options.
• Implementing LLM Ops-automating training, evaluation, deployment, and monitoring; establishing repeatable CI/CD for models and prompts; enabling safe rollback and A/B testing.
• Operationalizing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and other AI patterns-curating knowledge sources, indexing with vector search, and tuning prompts/evaluations to improve accuracy.
• Building reliable data pipelines-ingesting, transforming, and serving features with observability, lineage, and governance, in partnership with data engineering.
• Embedding responsible AI-privacy-by-design, model risk assessment, bias testing, PII handling, guardrails, and secure key/secret management; collaborating with security and governance.
• Scaling for production-capacity planning, performance optimization, caching, failover, and cost management; instrumenting telemetry to track business impact.
• Partnering across teams-working with product managers, architects, and salon-facing stakeholders to translate needs into solutions and roadmaps; documenting designs and runbooks.
• Advocating adoption-creating starter kits, templates, and reference implementations that help teams ship AI features faster while meeting standards.

Your Expertise

To land this job you will need:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field.
• 7-10+ years of progressive experience building production software, with 3-5+ years focused on ML/AI engineering (or equivalent).
• Strong programming skills in Python (preferred) and one or more of: C#, Java, or JavaScript; expertise with REST APIs.
• Cloud AI on Azure: Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI Service, Azure AI Search (vector), Cognitive Services, Azure Functions, Event Hub/Service Bus, Key Vault.
• Data & storage: SQL (e.g., SQL Server), NoSQL, data lakes, parquet/Delta, feature stores; vector databases/search systems; performance tuning.
• MLOps/LLMOps: Azure ML pipelines, model/package registries, version management, offline/online evaluation, drift and quality monitoring.
• DevOps: Git, Azure DevOps, CI/CD, infrastructure as code (Bicep/Terraform).
• Security & governance: threat modeling for AI systems, secret rotation, RBAC, network isolation, compliance; familiarity with secure data integration and web services.
• Bonus: Experience with Power Platform (Power Automate, Copilot Studio/agents), D365, SharePoint, Databricks/Synapse/Fabric; Azure AI Engineer or Solutions Architect certifications.
• Well-developed communication skills to interact effectively with business partners and vendors; leadership traits including creativity, problem solving, influence, and negotiation.

Your Work Environment

This is a hybrid work position requiring a combination of in-office workdays and the option to work from home on the remaining days. Working remotely will require reliable, secure internet.

Living the Values

We Are Kind

• Treat others the way you would like to be treated. Be humble, act honorably, and express gratitude. Respect and value everyone's role in our company's success.

We Exceed Expectations

• Innovate; be curious about what's possible. Be adaptable and eager to respond to challenges. Collaborate and work together to achieve our goals. Strive for greatness and inspire others by your example. Be proactive. Seek continuous improvement.

We Focus on Execution

• Make decisions with the belief it can be executed in 6,000 salons. Focus on impact of key brand measures. Prioritize on ability to execute quickly.

We Keep it Simple

• Set clear expectations. Make things easy to understand and execute. Stay focused on what's most important.

We Listen and Earn Trust

• Be respectfully honest; react thoughtfully. Respond quickly - 24 hours or less, and remember that personal contact is always best. Be transparent through open communication and candid conversation. Be willing to admit mistakes and fix them. Listen generously: Seek to understand