Staff AI Engineer (Tampa)

Join The #1 Furniture Company-Join The #1 Furniture Brand

Ashley Furniture Industries, Inc. is the largest manufacturer of furniture in the world. Established in 1945, Ashley offers one of the industrys broadest product assortments to retail partners in 123 countries.

Position Summary

Ashley seeks a Staff AI Engineer to join Ashley Furniture and lead the technical architecture of our agentic AI platform while remaining hands-on with critical implementations. You'll define how we build autonomous AI agent systems that operate across our supply chain, manufacturing, and retail domains, setting technical standards that enable the team to ship production features rapidly and reliably.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architecture : Define the technical strategy for our agentic AI platform. Design system architectures that support complex multi-agent workflows, real-time decision making, and seamless integration across supply chain and commerce systems. Make key technology choices that impact company trajectory.

Cross-Domain System Design : Architect AI systems that span Ashley Furniture's supply chain optimization, manufacturing intelligence, and retail experiences. Design unified data models and APIs that enable agents to reason across inventory, demand forecasting, production scheduling, and customer behavior.

Advanced Agent Development : Build sophisticated AI agents that handle complex, multi-step reasoning across business domains. Implement advanced patterns for tool use, multi-agent coordination, and human-in-the-loop controls for enterprise deployments.

Platform & Infrastructure : Lead development of our core AI platform that enables rapid deployment of new agentic workflows. Build robust foundations for prompt management, model evaluation, observability, and cost optimization across multiple LLM providers.

Team & Process Leadership : Mentor engineers and establish engineering practices that enable high-velocity feature development. Lead technical discussions, architecture reviews, and cross-functional collaboration with product and business teams.

Strategic Technical Decisions : Evaluate and integrate emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and methodologies. Make build-vs-buy decisions for critical infrastructure components. Drive adoption of new capabilities like Model Context Protocol and advanced reasoning patterns.

Qualifications

Deep AI / ML systems expertise : Extensive experience building production AI systems at scale. Deep understanding of LLM architectures, fine-tuning, prompt engineering, and agent orchestration frameworks. Experience with both traditional ML and modern LLM-based systems.

Systems architecture experience : You've designed and built complex distributed systems that handle high-throughput, low-latency requirements. Experience with microservices, event-driven architectures, and real-time data processing.

Domain expertise in operations : Strong understanding of business operations and data workflows. You can translate complex business requirements into scalable technical solutions and understand the operational constraints that impact system design.

Technical leadership track record : Experience leading technical teams, driving architectural decisions, and establishing engineering standards. You've successfully guided teams through technical challenges and scaling decisions.

Full-stack capabilities : Comfortable working across the entire technology stack from infrastructure to user interfaces. Experience with Python and cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP).

Advanced LLM expertise : Deep experience with LLM architectures, fine-tuning, post-training, prompt engineering, and context engineering for optimal retrieval. Experience building production systems that leverage multiple LLM providers.

Vision and multimodal systems : Extensive experience with vision models, computer vision, and multimodal AI systems. Experience building generative applications such as virtual furniture placement, room visualization, and spatial understanding systems that combine visual and textual understanding.

Agent integration expertise : Experience with Model Context Protocol (MCP) implementations and agent-to-agent communication patterns. Understanding of multi-agent coordination and workflow orchestration.

Nice To Have

• Deep understanding of multi-modal AI, tool use patterns, and agentic workflow design
• Background in real-time optimization, scheduling, or recommendation systems
• Experience building AI infrastructure platforms used by other engineers

Apply today and find your home at Ashley!

Benefits We Offer

Our Core Values

To learn more about Ashley Furniture, our community engagement programs, environmental stewardship, and our core values, please visit our Corporate Social Responsibility information page :

Corporate Social Responsibility

We are an equal opportunity employer and provide a drug-free working environment. While Ashley appreciates the interest of all candidates only those meeting specific position requirements may be contacted. Principals Only.