AI Engineer (AI & GenAI) - People Domain

As part of opening a permanent position (CDI), we are recruiting an AI Engineer, based optionally in Paris.

🚀 CONTEXT & STRATEGIC CHALLENGES

Within Decathlon Digital, the People Data team is embarking on a major initiative: transforming the experience of our 100,000 employees by integrating Generative and Agentic AI.

Faced with the fragmentation of the HR ecosystem in over 70 countries, our ambition is to build a simplification layer by leveraging the new solutions offered by AI. This is a centralized and tool-agnostic intelligence layer, capable of interacting with our entire infrastructure (Workday, Data Lake, University, ...) to evolve our interfaces from a consultation logic to an action logic.

In this context, we are developing DaiLY, our HR conversational agent. It helps our employees and managers access reliable information instantly, sourced from our Workday documentation and our People policies.

Already successfully deployed in France, DaiLY is entering a new phase of scaling: international expansion, industrialization of evaluations, continuous improvement of our models and their quality, and deployment and integration of autonomous HR agents. 

To lead this project, we are not just looking for a developer; we need a "Builder": someone capable of translating a business need into a technical solution, implementing it, qualifying it, deploying it, and maintaining it over time.

 🎯 YOUR MISSION

We are looking for an experienced AI Engineer to actively participate in the industrialization and development of DaiLY. Your objective is clear: to transform HR business needs into reliable, measurable, and robust AI functionalities.

To take on this challenge, you will work within a dedicated collective, in direct collaboration with other AI Engineers, an AI Lead Engineer (who will guide global architecture choices), and a Product Manager. This close-knit organization will allow you to ensure perfect synergy between product challenges, the roadmap, and technical implementation.

You will play a key role in the evolution of DaiLY: moving from a simple query model (Q&A) to a true transactional agentic system capable of triggering concrete actions (e.g., requesting leave in Workday, enrolling in training via Decathlon University).

🛠 YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES 

1. Agentic Development & Functionalities

• Participate in extending DaiLY's capabilities towards write actions by implementing tool-calling protocols (MCP - Model Context Protocol) and inter-agent communications (A2A).
• Implement advanced chunking and re-ranking strategies to prioritize HR-specific domain rules.
• Contribute to the optimization of costs, latency, and overall system efficiency in conjunction with the Platform and Infrastructure teams.

1. Quality, Evaluation & Observability (LLMOps)

• Develop and maintain the quality layer of the multi-agent RAG pipeline (Vertex AI Search / Discovery Engine).
• Ensure grounding of responses and verification of citations to guarantee traceability to a source of truth.
• Implement robust observability pipelines for online and offline evaluation (OpenTelemetry, MLflow).
• Code automatic evaluators based on golden datasets to iterate with confidence and prevent regressions before each production deployment.
• Integrate guardrails to protect the system and users from hallucinations and errors.

1. Security, Isolation & International Deployment

• Access Management (ACLs): Implement granular and dynamic access rights management at the indexing and retrieval level, ensuring that an employee only strictly accesses HR documents within their scope.
• Isolation & Multi-tenancy: Implement metadata filtering strategies in the vector database and isolation (of indexes and/or models) to ensure perfect data containment between different tax companies, legal entities, and geographies of Decathlon.
• Multilingual Support: Contribute to DaiLY's internationalization architecture by adapting RAG pipelines, embedding, and inference to maintain a high level of performance and relevance across a wide diversity of languages.

1. Product & Business Impact

• Assist in analyzing user intentions to measure DaiLY's impact.
• Translate, with the support of the Product Manager and Lead, business challenges into model behaviors and success metrics.

🧠 PROFILE SOUGHT

We are looking for a profile with at least initial experience.

• Experience: Experienced profile with several years of professional corporate experience (excluding internships and apprenticeships) in AI Engineering, ML Engineering, or AI-oriented Software Engineering. You also have at least one concrete and successful experience in deploying a GenAI or agentic system into production.
• Technical Stack: Solid mastery of Python, the GCP / Vertex AI ecosystem, and orchestration frameworks (LangChain, LlamaIndex, or ADK).
• LLM & Agentic Expertise: Solid mastery of RAG architectures (vector search, Vertex AI Vector Search, advanced metadata management), but especially agentic technical concepts: function/tool-calling, reasoning loops (ReAct, etc.), multi-agent workflow orchestration, structured output, and context/memory management.
• Quality & Evaluation: Ability to diagnose an incorrect response (model, retrieval, or data issue) and an appetite for application observability (SQL / BigQuery / MLflow).
• Languages: Fluent professional English (international environment).

The extras:

• In-depth technical knowledge of A2A (Agent-to-Agent) and MCP protocols.
• Experience in multimodal document processing or in HRIS ecosystems (e.g., Workday).
• Technical understanding of security issues (RBAC, ACLs, GDPR) applied to LLMs.
• Knowledge of microservices architectures and API design.

🎁 WHAT WE OFFER

• The opportunity to develop a cutting-edge agentic AI product with a direct impact on the daily lives of 100,000 employees.
• A premium technological environment (Google Cloud / Vertex AI / Databricks Stack).
• A flexible remote work policy (2 days per week remote, the rest in our Paris offices - Canal de l’Ourcq).
• A culture of delivery focused on autonomy, collective intelligence, and skill development (support from a Lead, certifications, training).
• Attractive benefits (monthly/quarterly bonuses, employee share ownership).
• An atmosphere resolutely focused on sports (numerous corporate events, product testing, sports or non-sports lunch breaks, …)