Ashley Furniture Industries · 8 hours ago
Senior Director, AI Engineering
United States
Full-time
Remote
Director/ExecutiveAshley Furniture Industries is the largest furniture manufacturer and retailer in North America, and they are seeking a Senior Director of AI Engineering to lead the development of agentic AI systems for their next-generation commerce platform. This role involves hands-on technical leadership, including system architecture, code development, and team building, with a focus on enhancing customer shopping experiences through advanced AI technologies.
FurnitureManufacturing
Responsibilities
Lead the design, development, and deployment of production agentic AI systems that power conversational commerce experiences
Build decision systems combining traditional ML with large language models (LLMs)—modeling short-term context from active conversations and maintaining long-term customer memory
Develop multi-agent architectures with specialized orchestration for shopping, sales enablement, and customer support use cases
Design and implement RAG systems, tool use patterns, and memory architectures that enable personalized, context-aware interactions
Drive post-training and fine-tuning strategies to adapt foundation models for commerce-specific tasks
Build integrations with third-party AI platforms—shipping features that put our products in front of customers wherever they're already using AI
Establish evaluation frameworks, quality metrics, and measurement methodologies for agent performance at scale
Partner with product, design, and experience teams to ship features that improve customer engagement, conversion, and satisfaction
Build and grow a team of AI engineers and applied scientists—hire exceptional talent, set technical direction, and develop people
Qualification
Required
Deep experience building customer-facing AI products—you've shipped conversational AI, shopping assistants, or recommendation systems that real users interact with at scale
Strong technical expertise with LLMs and agentic systems: RAG architectures, tool use, memory systems, multi-agent coordination, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and evaluation frameworks
Production ML experience—you understand the tradeoffs between model quality, latency, cost, and reliability. You've optimized inference, managed model serving infrastructure, and built observability into AI systems
Hands-on technical leader—you're still close to the code, can debug production issues, and lead by example. You balance technical depth with people leadership
Experience building and managing high-performing teams—hiring, mentoring, and developing engineers. You've created environments where talented people do their best work
Strong communication skills—you drive clarity across engineering, product, and business teams. You can translate technical complexity into business impact
Preferred
Experience in e-commerce, retail, or marketplace environments
Background in computer vision, multi-modal AI, or 3D/spatial understanding
Experience building integrations with AI platform providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google)
Familiarity with MCP (Model Context Protocol) or similar standards for AI discoverability
Experience with two-sided marketplace dynamics—building for both consumer and merchant/retailer experiences
Benefits
Competitive base
Bonus
3 weeks PTO
Company
Ashley Furniture Industries
Ashley Furniture Industries is the furniture manufacturer, delivering home furnishing values, stylish furnishings, and home decor.
Founded in 1945
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Ashley Furniture Industries has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (21)
2024 (24)
2023 (19)
2022 (40)
2021 (39)
2020 (23)
Funding
Current Stage
Late StageLeadership Team
Richard Teachout
Chief Technology Officer
Recent News
Seattle TechFlash
2025-12-14
2025-10-30
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