Lead Engineer

Catalyst Brands is a retail operating company formed by the merger of SPARC Group and JCPenney. It manages a portfolio of five iconic American apparel and retail brands—JCPenney, Aéropostale, Brooks Brothers, Lucky Brand, and Nautica—focused on accelerating growth through shared technology and data. We bring scale, expertise and wider-than-ever appeal to customers across America. We are a diverse community of people, all working together to bring sensational style, sensible prices and the best service possible to our customers. We’re looking for talented individuals who want to work in an energetic, respectful, collaborative environment. With a wide array of jobs, training and more, there are countless opportunities for you to grow your career with us.

Role Summary:

We're looking for a Lead Engineer – AI & Data Engineering to lead our AI initiatives and drive the development of innovative, enterprise-scale AI solutions. This role combines modern data engineering with Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, and Machine Learning to build intelligent, scalable, and secure platforms that deliver business value.

Primary Responsibilities • Lead the design and implementation of scalable, secure, and high-performance AI platforms. • Build reliable batch and streaming data pipelines using modern cloud technologies. • Architect AI-powered business solutions using Large Language Models (LLMs). • Build Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications and AI agents. • Partner with Data Science teams to operationalize ML models. • Implement prompt engineering, AI evaluation, governance, and responsible AI practices. • Drive cloud performance, scalability, and cost optimization. • Lead architecture reviews, code reviews, and mentor engineering teams.

Basic Qualifications • Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, Data Science, or related field. • 10+ years of Data Engineering or Software Engineering experience. • 2+ years building AI/Generative AI solutions. • Strong Python, SQL, PySpark, and Spark expertise. • Experience with AWS, Snowflake/Redshift or Databricks. • Experience with Airflow, DBT, Docker, Kubernetes, GitLab, and CI/CD. • Strong data modeling and cloud architecture experience.

Required AI Skills • Large Language Models (OpenAI, Claude, Llama, Gemini) • Amazon Bedrock, Azure OpenAI or Vertex AI • LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex • Vector databases (Pinecone, FAISS, ChromaDB) • Prompt Engineering • RAG Architecture • AI Agents • Responsible AI

Preferred Qualifications • Master’s degree in computer science, AI, ML, or Data Science. • Experience building Enterprise AI platforms and AI Assistants. • MLOps experience with MLflow, SageMaker, or Databricks ML. • Knowledge of Kafka, DataHub, Unity Catalog, or Great Expectations. • Experience in Retail, E-commerce, or Consumer Analytics.