Senior Director, Enterprise AI

7-Eleven is an iconic family of brands with over 86,000 locations, surpassing every retailer in the world. We revolutionize convenience, restaurants and fuel through cutting edge innovation — working hard to be the customer's first choice. 7-Eleven empowers our employees to "activate awesome" and make a meaningful impact in their stores and communities every day. If you're ready to grow, lead and make a difference, come join our team and help shape the future of convenience.

Job Overview

7-Eleven is on a multi-year journey to become an AI-first retailer — embedding intelligence into every store, every customer interaction, every enterprise decision, and every line of code we ship. We are seeking a Senior Director, Enterprise AI to lead the design, engineering, and scaling of the AI platforms that power that transformation.

This is a builder's leadership role. It combines AI strategy, product innovation, and hands-on engineering leadership, with end-to-end accountability for delivering production-grade AI systems across four frontiers: AI for Customer (Agentic Commerce), AI for Stores, AI for Enterprise, and AI for SDLC. You will own the roadmap from real-time, edge-based decisioning in stores to agentic, personalized commerce for millions of customers — while modernizing how 7-Eleven's own engineering organization builds software with AI.

The Four Pillars of 7-Eleven's AI Journey

1. AI for Customer — Agentic Commerce

Reimagine the customer experience around autonomous, intelligent agents that anticipate and act on customer needs.

• Build customer-facing AI: personalization, recommendations, conversational and agentic shopping experiences, and retail media.
• Deliver agentic commerce capabilities — AI agents that plan, decide, and complete tasks across mobile, loyalty, and digital channels on the customer's behalf.
• Drive data-driven, frictionless journeys that measurably improve satisfaction, engagement, and revenue per customer.

2. AI for Stores

Bring real-time intelligence to the edge — across thousands of stores.

• Deliver AI for intelligent store operations: inventory, labor, equipment uptime, loss prevention, and automation.
• Enable edge and real-time AI and computer vision for in-store decisioning where latency and reliability are critical.
• Integrate AI into core store systems (POS, supply chain, store apps) to improve speed, accuracy, and associate productivity.

3. AI for Enterprise

Embed AI into corporate decision-making and enterprise workflows.

• Scale high-impact GenAI and predictive use cases across merchandising, finance, supply chain, and corporate operations.
• Build enterprise knowledge, copilots, and automation that augment decision-making and reduce manual effort.
• Integrate AI capabilities into core enterprise platforms and data ecosystems.

4. AI for SDLC

Transform how 7-Eleven builds software with AI.

• Drive adoption of AI-assisted engineering — code generation, automated testing, code review, documentation, and DevOps automation.
• Establish platforms, standards, and guardrails that accelerate developer velocity and software quality across engineering teams.
• Measure and improve engineering throughput, cycle time, and quality through AI-augmented SDLC tooling.

Key Responsibilities

Strategy & Retail AI Innovation

• Define and execute a multi-year enterprise AI roadmap aligned to customer, store, enterprise, and engineering priorities.
• Identify and scale high-impact use cases across all four pillars.
• Translate emerging capabilities (GenAI, agentic AI, predictive analytics, computer vision) into practical, production retail solutions.

AI Engineering & Platform Delivery

• Own end-to-end AI engineering delivery: architecture → production → scale.
• Build and operate enterprise AI platforms — data pipelines, MLOps/LLMOps, real-time inference, agent orchestration, and GenAI tooling.
• Enable edge and real-time AI for in-store and customer-facing applications.
• Integrate AI into core systems (POS, mobile, loyalty, supply chain, enterprise platforms).
• Establish standards for scalability, reliability, and performance.

Operational Impact & Scale

• Scale AI across thousands of stores and millions of customer interactions.
• Drive measurable outcomes across revenue, efficiency, and productivity.
• Establish KPIs for adoption, performance, and ROI across each pillar.

Governance & Risk

• Implement responsible AI frameworks covering risk, compliance, data privacy, and security.
• Ensure enterprise-grade governance across all AI systems and agents.

Leadership & Influence

• Build and lead a high-performing AI engineering organization.
• Partner across IT, Digital, Product, and Operations to drive adoption.
• Influence executive stakeholders and embed AI into core business strategy.

Qualifications

• 12–15+ years in AI/ML engineering, data platforms, or advanced analytics, with proven delivery at scale.
• Strong track record building production AI systems and platforms — including GenAI and agentic AI.
• Deep knowledge of ML, GenAI, MLOps/LLMOps, and cloud ecosystems (Azure, AWS, GCP).
• Experience with AI-assisted software development and modern SDLC tooling.
• Retail, multi-site, or customer-centric environment experience preferred.
• Ability to operate as both a hands-on technologist and a strategic leader.

#LI-TS2

If an hourly or salary range is included in this ad it represents the range 7-Eleven in good faith believes is the range of compensation for this role at the time of this posting. The Company may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range. This range is only applicable for jobs to be performed in this state. This range may be modified in the future. No amount is considered to be wages or compensation until such amount is earned, vested, and determinable under the terms and conditions of the applicable policies and plans. The amount and availability of any bonus, commission, long-term incentive compensation, benefits, or any other form of compensation and benefits that are allocable to a particular employee remains in the Company's sole discretion unless and until paid and may be modified at the Company’s sole discretion, consistent with the law.

For a general description of all benefits 7-Eleven is offering in the US for the position, please visit this link.

For a general description of all benefits 7-Eleven is offering in Canada for the position, please visit this link.