Yum! Brands · 9 hours ago
Sr Manager, Data Science & AI Engineering
Plano, TX
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
$166K/yr - $227K/yr
8+ years expYum! Brands is seeking a Senior Manager, Data Science & AI Engineering to lead and scale their hybrid team of Data Scientists and AI Engineers. This role involves overseeing workstreams that span forecasting, personalization, experimentation, and intelligent agent development using both structured data and foundation models.
HospitalityFood and BeverageRestaurants
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
Provide oversight on LLM fine-tuning, prompt design, ASR/embedding adaptation, and production readiness
Guide architectural choices around model selection, evaluation design, and deployment workflows
Shape end-to-end ML and AI strategy across core DS use cases (forecasting, pricing, recommendation) and emerging LLM/VLM applications
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
Qualification
Required
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
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
A dollar-for-dollar matching gift program
Generous parental leave
Competitive benefits including medical, dental, vision and life insurance
6% 401k match
Company
Yum! Brands
Yum! Brands is a quick-service restaurant brand that primarily operates the likes of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell.
1001-5000 employees
H1B Sponsorship
Yum! Brands has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2021 (1)
2020 (2)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$3.5B2025-09-09Post Ipo Debt· $1.5B
2024-04-26Post Ipo Debt· $2B
1997-09-26IPO
Leadership Team
Christopher Turner
Chief Executive Officer
Ranjith Roy
Chief Financial Officer
Recent News
Food Business News
2026-02-11
Financial Post
2026-02-11
2026-02-06
Company data provided by crunchbase