Hybrid Senior Manager, Data Science & AI Engineering

at Yum! Center for Global Franchise Excellence

• Job title: Senior Manager, Data Science & AI Engineering
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: $165,700 - $226,800 per year
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Plano, United States

About the role

• Senior Manager overseeing Data Science and AI Engineering at Yum Crave AI. Leading a hybrid team across traditional ML and next-gen AI systems.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of Data Scientists and AI Engineers across multiple domains and products.
• Provide technical and career development guidance; foster a collaborative, high-trust culture.
• Drive standards for experimentation, evaluation, reproducibility, and model performance.
• Shape end-to-end ML and AI strategy across core DS use cases (forecasting, pricing, recommendation) and emerging LLM/VLM applications.
• Guide architectural choices around model selection, evaluation design, and deployment workflows.
• Provide oversight on LLM fine-tuning, prompt design, ASR/embedding adaptation, and production readiness.
• Act as a key interface between technical contributors and business/product stakeholders.
• Distill analytical output and AI system behavior into clear presentations, dashboards, or executive summaries.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, TPM, and Ops to align team output with company priorities.

Requirements

• 8+ years of experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, or AI Engineering.
• Experience leading and coaching high-performing technical teams.
• Hands-on expertise in both traditional ML (regression, classification, forecasting) and modern AI techniques (LLMs, RAG, embeddings, multimodal models).
• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence senior leadership and simplify complex topics.
• Preferred Qualifications:
• Experience building or scaling hybrid DS+AI teams in enterprise environments.
• Familiarity with LangChain, HuggingFace, OpenAI, Pinecone, or vector-based ML architectures.
• Exposure to business domains such as QSR, retail, personalization, or intelligent automation.

Benefits

• 4 weeks’ vacation PLUS holidays
• Sick leave
• 2 paid days to volunteer at the cause of their choice
• Dollar-for-dollar matching gift program
• Generous parental leave
• Competitive benefits including medical, dental, vision and life insurance
• 6% 401k match
• Recognition culture