Engineering Manager, Agent Discovery & Commerce Engineering

Live the experience . From professional empowerment to continual learning opportunities. From ongoing investment in new and emerging technologies to a career of self-determination. At Ulta Beauty, our tech team is critical to our scalability—and is recognized that way. We’ve been defined as a “mature start-up.” A place where interdepartmental exposure, open doors, and genuine collaboration is ubiquitous. Where challenges come fast and furious, requiring agility, mental dexterity, and creativity. Where our passion for better solutions drives us and is core to who we are.   We’re engineering for the future of retail, and it’s no-holds-barred. But for those motivated by continual change and ambiguity, by superior leadership, by whip smart colleagues who will press you daily for your very best, you’ll find that virtually nothing’s impossible at Ulta Beauty. THE IMPACT YOU CAN MAKE:   The Engineering Manager, Agent Discovery & Commerce Engineering leads the engineering team responsible for AI-powered discovery and agentic commerce capabilities across external AI channels, partner ecosystems, and core commerce platforms. Product owns the guest problem, priorities, and business outcomes; this role owns people leadership, the technical roadmap, delivery execution, quality, and production operability, while partnering with Enterprise Architecture on enterprise patterns.   This role builds reusable agentic platform capabilities, common APIs, and integration patterns; takes capabilities from pilot to scalable production; and ensures security, observability, service-level objectives (SLOs), resilience, incident management, cost efficiency, and peak readiness. The manager is accountable for hiring, coaching, performance management, succession planning, team capacity, and developing engineers and technical leads.   YOU’LL ACCOMPLISH THESE GOALS BY:   People Leadership: Hire, coach, and develop engineers and technical leads; manage performance, succession, capacity, role clarity, and team health. Engineering Ownership: Own the engineering team, technical roadmap, delivery execution, quality, and production operability. Translate product priorities into clear technical plans and commitments. Product & Stakeholder Partnership: Partner with Product, which owns the guest problem, priorities, and business outcomes, and align Business, Operations, Data, Security, and other stakeholders on scope, tradeoffs, dependencies, and readiness. Platform & Architecture: Build reusable capabilities, common APIs, and integration patterns that accelerate onboarding of new agentic surfaces and avoid one-off partner implementations. Partner with Enterprise Architecture on enterprise standards and patterns. Pilot to Production: Lead capabilities from pilot through scalable production, including security, observability, SLOs, resilience, release readiness, incident management, cost efficiency, and peak readiness. Agentic Engineering: Lead engineering across agent orchestration, agent protocols and interoperability standards, tool and API design, search and retrieval, evaluations and guardrails, external AI integrations, and core commerce platforms. Engineering Culture: Champion agile delivery, engineering excellence, continuous improvement, and responsible AI-enabled software development practices.   ADDITIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES: Manage the engineering delivery cadence, including technical backlog readiness, sprint planning, release coordination, technical checkpoints, demonstrations, and status reporting. Ensure required engineering artifacts and governance evidence are complete and current, including solution designs, architecture decision records, interface contracts, test plans, release checklists, and operational runbooks. Establish and report engineering measures for delivery predictability, defect trends, platform reuse, partner onboarding time, availability, latency, quality, incident trends, and cost efficiency. Manage