Senior Engineer Software - Backend Python T500-22706

About Albertsons Companies Inc.:

As a leading food and drug retailer in the United States, Albertsons Companies, Inc. operates over 2,200 stores across 35 states and the District of Columbia. Our well-known banners across the United States, including Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco and others, serve more than 36 million U.S customers each week.

We build and shape technology solutions that solve customers’ problems every day, making things easier for them when they shop with us online or in a store. We have made bold, strategic moves to migrate and modernize our core foundational capabilities, positioning ourselves as the first fully cloud-based grocery tech company in the industry.

Our success is built on a one-team approach, driven by the desire to understand and enhance the customer experience. By constantly pushing the boundaries of retail, we are transforming shopping into an experience that is easy, efficient, fun and engaging.

About Albertsons Companies India:

At Albertsons Companies India, we're not just pushing the boundaries of technology and retail innovation, we're cultivating a space where ideas flourish and careers thrive. Our workplace in India is a vital extension of the Albertsons Companies Inc. workforce and important to the next phase in the company’s technology journey to support millions of customers’ lives every day.

At the Albertsons Companies India, we are raising the bar to grow across Technology & Engineering, AI, Digital and other company functions, and transform a 165-year-old American retailer. At Albertsons Companies India associates collaborate directly with international teams, enhancing decision-making processes and organizational agility through exciting and pivotal projects. Your work will make history and help millions of lives each day come together around the joys of food and inspire their well-being.

AI Engineer (Backend, Python) — 6–9 Years

What you’ll do:

• Lead architecture for scalable AI backend platforms (multi-service workflows, tool layer, retrieval, evaluation/monitoring)
• Set standards for workflow reliability: idempotency, compensation, isolation, multi-tenant readiness, cost/latency controls
• Drive system design for throughput: streaming (SSE/WebSocket), concurrency limits, queueing/backpressure, benchmarking
• Own production excellence: SLOs, incident playbooks, observability strategy, capacity planning
• Establish security posture: AuthN/AuthZ (JWT/OAuth/service-to-service), secrets, auditing, access controls

Must-have:

• 6+ years building/operating backend systems in Python at scale
• Expert async/concurrency/parallelism + distributed systems depth
• Strong platform/API architecture (gRPC nice-to-have), operational leadership
• AuthN/AuthZ design and security fundamentals for production systems
• Proven delivery of AI-backed systems in production (agents/RAG/tooling)

Nice-to-have:

• K8s/service mesh, policy/guardrails, evaluation pipelines, developer platform experience

Screening Keywords:

• Backend architecture, platform engineering
• Distributed systems design, scalability, reliability, SLO/SLI
• Async/concurrency strategy, queueing, load/performance testing, capacity planning
• Workflow/state machine orchestration, idempotency, compensation patterns
• Security: AuthN/AuthZ, OAuth2, JWT, service-to-service auth, secrets management, auditing
• Multi-tenant design, isolation, rate limiting, cost controls
• Observability strategy, incident management, postmortems, on-call leadership
• Docker + Kubernetes (preferred)
• AI systems in production: agents, RAG, tool execution, evaluation/monitoring