Principal Engineer, ML

at  Carmax

8116 - Midtown Office - 2220 W. Broad Street, Richmond, Virginia, 23220
CarMax, the way your career should be!
At CarMax, a Principal Engineer, AI & ML is a technologist and thought leader who can leverage and advance the state-of-the-art in deep learning computer vision and image generation to influence CarMax digital media assets. You should have extensive knowledge and experience with Machine Learning concepts, tools, and design patterns at enterprise scale. You should also be able to propose, architect, and implement machine learning and computer vision based solutions as software services. You will play a critical role in capturing customer use cases, while shaping and executing a strategy to build reliable and scalable machine learning and AI capabilities for the adoption and the broad use across the enterprise.
This role will closely partner with Data Scientists, managers, and architects to design and productionalize CV/ML systems, including testing and monitoring of the applications. The ideal candidate will have the substantial experience in software engineering and cloud engineering that is necessary to turn machine learning and CV into highly visible, mission-critical capabilities that drive CarMax’s iconic customer experience.

MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, , relevant technical field, or equivalent practical experience
• Optional for sponsorship needs: Master’s Degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or relevant technical field
• 7+ years of software-engineering experience in an enterprise-level environment in one or more of the following areas: machine learning/artificial intelligence, cloud computing, systems engineering
• 3+ years’ experience with microservices software architecture
• 3+ years leading the end-to-end design and development of scalable services to be consumed by the enterprise, including monitoring and production support
• 3+ years’ experience building enterprise-level solutions with Microsoft Azure or equivalent cloud technologies
• Experience with at least one major machine learning framework such as Tensorflow or PyTorch
• Practical experience/theoretical understanding of developing and deploying computer vision deep learning models (e.g., CNN, Detectron, UNET, YOLO etc) at scale in production
• Experience in developing generative models such as diffusion models, GANs, and emerging methods
• Proficiency in developing and debugging in Python
• Proficiency in version control systems (Git) for AI/ML model versioning
• Experience with scripting languages such as shell scripts
• Experience in DevOps practices, testing frameworks, and CI/CD
• Experience with Model Development and Deployment (MLFlow, Azure ML)
• Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker)
• Experience communicating and working across functions to drive organization-wide solutions
• Ability to positively influence team norms, culture, and technical vision

PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:

• Previous experience deploying large-scale applications on Azure
• Familiarity with MLOps and industry-standard machine-learning Python libraries
• Experience with Azure AI services (Azure Machine Learning, Azure Cognitive Services)
• Advanced AI/ML specializations (reinforcement learning, deep learning, NLP)
• Proficient in an object-oriented programming language (i.e. C#, Java)

Work Location and Arrangement: This role will be based out of one of the following locations and have a Hybrid work arrangement:

• Richmond, VA Technology Innovation Center
• Dallas, TX Technology Hub
• Atlanta, GA CarMax Auto Finance Office

Work Authorization: Candidates must be legally authorized to work for any U.S. employer on a full-time basis. Sponsorship will be considered for this specific role.
Upon an applicant’s request, CarMax will consider reasonable accommodation to complete the CarMax Job Application.

ESSENTIAL RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Help guide junior developers in computer vision and deep learning fundamentals such as feature extraction, CNNs, supervised machine learning, transfer learning and distributed deep learning
• Serve as an engineering lead on various business delivery and engineering excellence initiatives
• Suggest, collect, and translate requirements into an effective feature roadmap for organization platform capabilities
• Evaluate and recommend tradeoffs of features to the platform that allow use case owners to refine output generation and new technology offerings in the space
• Be a key partner in driving direction and goals for the team, both in terms of individual project impacts but also overall standards for machine learning and AI utilization in the organization
• Guide teams in developing integration, end-to-end, and UAT test strategy as well as testing activities
• Help drive the broader understanding of the use of machine learning and AI by interfacing with key roles in Operations, Legal, Security, and Technology
• Stay on top of industry trends and best practices to continuously improve what we do and ensure our customer experience is the best it can be
• Lead, mentor, and develop other engineers using technical expertise, best practices and industry standards for machine learning and AI systems

Work Location and Arrangement: This role will be based out of one of the following locations and have a Hybrid work arrangement:

• Richmond, VA Technology Innovation Center
• Dallas, TX Technology Hub
• Atlanta, GA CarMax Auto Finance Offic