With a career at The Home Depot, you can be yourself and also be part of something bigger.
Position Purpose:
The Sr. Systems Engineer within the CoreAI team is responsible for independently developing, maintaining, and supporting The Home Depot's generative AI and agentic infrastructure that drives the success of Home Depot and our customers. Leading from a THD mindset, you will apply a first principles approach to solve complex engineering problems, breaking down ambiguous challenges to architect robust, scalable systems from the ground up. You will act as a consultative technical bridge between cutting-edge AI frameworks and practical enterprise business applications.
As a Sr. Systems Engineer, you will be part of a dynamic team with engineers of all experience levels who help each other build and grow technical and leadership skills while creating, deploying, and supporting production-grade AI infrastructure. You will independently lead technical discovery sessions, architect custom ADK agents based on core engineering fundamentals, and establish governance for organizational-wide usage. In addition, Sr. Systems Engineers may be involved in routine model upgrades and application support, as well as rigorous root cause and post-mortem analyses around AI security incidents, system hallucinations, distributed system bottlenecks, and service interruptions.
Key Responsibilities:
- 30% Delivery & Execution - Keeps abreast of innovations and industry trends as well as changes to internal systems and determines how they impacts tools, training, and support necessary to keep systems up, running, and secure; Participates in and contributes to learning activities around modern systems engineering core practices (communities of practice); Proactively views articles, tutorials, and videos to learn about new technologies and best practices being used within other technology organizations
- 15% Learning - Keeps abreast of innovations and industry trends as well as changes to internal systems and determines how they impacts tools, training, and support necessary to keep systems up, running, and secure; Participates in and contributes to learning activities around modern systems engineering core practices (communities of practice); Proactively views articles, tutorials, and videos to learn about new technologies and best practices being used within other technology organizations
- 20% Planning & Analysis - Researches and analyzes business trends and behavioral data to identify opportunities for improvements and new initiatives; Drives the evaluation, development, and recommendation of specific technology to provide cost-effective solutions that meet THD requirements; Researches and designs best fit infrastructure, network, database, cloud, AI, and security architectures for products; Proactively creates and maintains tools for monitoring and support; Participates in project planning and reporting across multiple efforts
- 35% Support & Enablement - Collaborates with product and project teams to understand needs and enable them with infrastructure; Supports technology architecture design review efforts for project and product teams; Leverages tooling and custom applications to monitor the operational status of applications, infrastructure, networks, databases, and security; optimizes and tunes performance as appropriate; Drives root cause analysis, debugging, support, and post-mortem analysis for security incidents and service interruptions; Maintains, upgrades, and supports existing systems and infrastructure to ensure operational stability; Opens and manages vendor problem tickets to resolution; Drives the production of in-house documentation around solutions; Provides application support for software running in production; Drives moving KB articles to infrastructure as code models; Drives keeping monitoring/alerting up to date
Direct Manager/Direct Reports:
- This position typically reports to Systems Engineer Manager or Sr Manager
- This position has 0 Direct Reports
Travel Requirements:
Physical Requirements:
- Most of the time is spent sitting in a comfortable position and there is frequent opportunity to move about. On rare occasions there may be a need to move or lift light articles.
Working Conditions:
- Located in a comfortable indoor area. Any unpleasant conditions would be infrequent and not objectionable.
Minimum Qualifications:
- Must be eighteen years of age or older.
- Must be legally permitted to work in the United States.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Professional or educational experience as an Information Technology, Platform, or AI/MLOps Engineer, with a strong emphasis on applying first principles thinking to system design and troubleshooting.
- Experience working as part of a collaborative, cross-functional, modern engineering team, including a proven ability to lead technical discovery sessions and present tailored architectural solutions to both technical (MLEs, developers) and non-technical business stakeholders.
- Experience with scripting and programming, with mandatory strong proficiency in Python, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and building robust ADK agents. Familiarity with orchestration frameworks like LangChain or LlamaIndex is a plus.
- Experience with cloud platforms, primarily GCP, with hands-on core engineering expertise in Vertex AI Agent Engine, Vertex AI Vector Search, and BigQuery.
- Experience monitoring the operational status and performance of, and configuring as well as tuning, systems, networks, vector databases, and LLM telemetry (latency, token usage, cost).
- Familiarity with system and environment analysis, design, and optimization for enterprise-wide generative AI platforms, focusing on foundational engineering requirements like high availability, fault tolerance, and establishing AI governance and compliance guardrails.
- Experience in troubleshooting and remediation within multiple Information technology disciplines, applying deep root-cause analysis to resolve complex agentic workflow and distributed system failures.
- Experience installing and upgrading applications or databases and performing system maintenance for high-throughput ML/AI workloads.
- Familiarity with debuggers, runtime analysis, library systems, compiled programming, and software update tools.
- Experience supporting a 24x7 retail operation, understanding the immense scale, security, and reliability required for THD enterprise systems.
- Experience with version control systems and CI/CD toolchains tailored for the deployment of ML models, AI agents, and microservices.
- Experience with production system designs including Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform), containerization (e.g., GKE), High Availability, and Performance monitoring.
- Exposure to Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), including enforcing least-privilege IAM policies and securely managing auth tokens for AI service accounts.
Minimum Education:
- The knowledge, skills and abilities typically acquired through the completion of a bachelor's degree program or equivalent degree in a field of study related to the job.
Preferred Education:
Minimum Years of Work Experience:
Preferred Years of Work Experience:
- No additional years of experience
Minimum Leadership Experience:
Preferred Leadership Experience:
Certifications:
Competencies:
- Action Oriented
- Being Resilient
- Global Perspective
- Manages Ambiguity
- Nimble Learning
- Self-Development
- Collaborates
- Cultivates Innovation
- Optimizes Work Processes
- Situational Adaptability
- Communicates Effectively
- Drives Results
- Interpersonal Savvy
Benefits offered include health care benefits, 401K, ESPP, paid time off, and success sharing bonus. For a full list of the various benefits The Home Depot offers, visit https://careers.homedepot.com/our-benefits.
For California, Colorado, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Nevada, New York City, Ithaca (NY), Westchester County (NY), and Washington residents:
The pay range for this position is between $90,000 - $180,000
