Senior Forward Deployed AI Engineering Manager

Staples is building the future of Marketplace through practical, AI-enabled solutions that help teams work smarter, move faster, and create measurable business impact.

The Marketplace organization sits at the intersection of product, commercial strategy, operations, and technology—solving complex challenges that directly support growth, efficiency, and customer experience.

As the Senior Forward Deployed AI Engineering Manager, you will be a business-embedded technical leader responsible for identifying, shaping, and rapidly delivering AI-enabled solutions to high-value operational and commercial challenges.

This is a hands-on builder role—not a traditional roadmap-bound engineering role and not a sales or demo function.

You will work directly with Marketplace leaders, product managers, commercial teams, Technology, and Data/AI partners to uncover real-world inefficiencies, translate ambiguous problems into structured technical approaches, and develop working solution pathways that can be validated, scaled, and operationalized.

This role will require the incumbent to work on a 4-day/week on-site schedule from our Framingham corporate offices.

We are open to candidates that are willing to relocate and have the ability to provide assistance.

What you’ll be doing:

• Embed within Marketplace operations, product, and commercial teams to understand end-to-end workflows, undocumented processes, edge cases, and operational nuances.
• Identify, define, and prioritize AI and automation opportunities based on business impact, scalability, and feasibility.
• Translate ambiguous business problems into structured technical approaches, solution hypotheses, and build plans.
• Develop and deploy rapid prototypes or proof of concepts using internal platforms, enterprise data, and modern AI/ML and large language model tooling.
• Validate solutions using real-world data and workflows to demonstrate measurable business value.
• Partner with Technology and Data/AI teams to transition validated prototypes into scalable, production-ready solutions.
• Serve as a critical bridge between business stakeholders and technical teams, ensuring clarity of requirements and continuity of context.
• Drive adoption of deployed solutions by staying engaged through rollout, iteration, and performance measurement.
• Establish and track success metrics tied to business outcomes such as efficiency gains, cost reduction, revenue impact, and user adoption.