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About This Role
Job Description:
Company Information:
ITW Global Brands (ITWGB) specializes in servicing the Auto Aftermarket, selling car care products under the Black Magic®, Blue Coral®, Fast Orange®, Fix-A-Flat®, Genuine Innovations®, Gumout®, No Touch®, Permatex®, Rain-X®, Slime®, and Spray Nine® brands. These brands compete in the wiper blade, engine repair, hand cleaner, appearance, cleaners & degreasers, tire repair and performance products segments of the Automotive Aftermarket. Many of our brands are #1 in their respective categories.
Position Summary
As a key member of the ITW Global Brands leadership team, the Sales Director is responsible for developing, leading, and executing targeted selling strategies for all categories within the General Retail channel which includes the Mass, Home Improvement, Farm, Hardware, Military, and Convenience markets. This leader drives profitable, above‑market growth by owning the full P&L for the channel ensuring accurate roll‑up of revenue, margin, and profitability, and partnering cross‑functionally to deliver against financial commitments. Success in this role will be achieved through disciplined execution of the ITW growth levers, development and deployment of the business Sales Excellence framework, and strong collaboration across the Automotive Aftermarket Group. The Sales Director oversees approximately $80–90M in annual revenue and reports directly to the VP of Sales.
The job involves all categories within the ITW Automotive Aftermarket Group which includes Car Care, Tire Repair and Engine Repair.
This position is based Remote from Home.
Key Responsibilities
Strategic Planning
- Partner with the Leadership team to develop and execute Annual and Long Range Plans based on an in-depth understanding of market, business, and Sales activities.
- Develop Sales strategies for targeted categories leveraging insights from customers and stakeholders, external market trends, to develop actions/tactics to support the growth strategy.
- Manage the long-term strategic development of the channel Sales team with focus on top products to ensure alignment and allocation of the required resources/talents.
- Collaborate and align with all functions and other ITW AAM divisions to preserve existing business and pursue growth opportunities.
Sales Planning and Management
- Responsible for Annual and Long-term Sales Plans for all relevant categories and new opportunities to achieve targeted outcomes.
- Own the P&L for the General Retail channel ensuring accurate roll-up of financial performance including revenue, margin, and profitability, and partner cross-functionally to deliver against financial commitments.
- Manage and lead the Sales team to achieve above-market growth rates in strategic markets.
- Establish team and value-based data-driven selling discipline with well-defined value propositions and business cases that solve customer pain points.
- Drive disciplined Sales funnel management through leveraging the Sales process and CRM tool.
- Accurately forecast and report (monthly/quarterly) on order intake, revenue, and relevant Sales KPIs that align to the Annual and Long Range Plans.
- Drive the development of contracts that are in line with ITW requirements.
- Assess, manage, and actively address market, customer and competitor changes.
- Provide value-added input to Voice of Customer process to ensure customer pain points and value proposition (discovery interviews, …e.g.) are captured.
- Develop a performance driven Sales culture with relevant KPI´s and compensation structure.
- Work with other divisional Leaders and the Sales team to further simplify the business and improve/build the continuous improvement culture within the Sales organization.
- Drive consistent actions that are aligned with ITW business model.
Team Leadership and Development
- Develop a high performing results-driven culture and structure.
- Foster a culture of inclusion, engagement, and accountability.
- Ability to create followership by influencing, embodying, and communicating a compelling vision that aligns with ITW goals and culture.
- Create and drive development plans for direct reports and high potential leaders to ensure high quality of the Sales team and talent pipeline.
- Effectively lead change management process that ensures organizational capability that executes on the Annual and Long Range Plans.
- Coaches through consistent and transparent feedback, development planning, and performance management.
- Use appropriate interpersonal styles and techniques to gain buy-in of ideas and plans.
Other Duties
- Support other projects and initiatives as assigned.
Qualifications
Education & Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in a related field required. Master’s preferred.
- 7+ years of previous Sales experience required.
- 4+ years team management experience.
- Experience with managing large retail accounts across Home Improvement, Farm, Hardware, Mass, and Convenience channels (buying process and existing relationships).
- Demonstrated successes in strategic planning and management in brick and mortar and Ecommerce preferred.
Skills & Abilities
Core Competencies
- Excellent ability to analyze complex Sales data and determine appropriate actions to improve large account position.
- Excellent ability in key decision-making and influencing skills.
- Excellent negotiation and Sales skills.
- Excellent ability to cultivate customer relationships across customer’s multiple departments and at multiple levels vertically including executive leadership.
- Excellent communication skills (both internally, across VP/GM & directors, and externally with customer senior management), including professional presentation skills.
- Collaborative team player and leader. Ability to work within a matrix environment and across all levels of the organization.
- Strong training and presentation skills.
- Able to work under pressure and in deadline environment.
- Domestic travel as needed.
- Must be able to work independently and obtain results with minimal supervision while influencing subordinates.
Additional Skills
- Strategic planning and management for brick and mortar and Ecommerce preferred
- Multi-channel strategy development
- Retail segment complexity management
- Data analysis customer relationships
- Drive for results
- Embrace & use of ITW Toolbox
- Influence and leadership
- Business perspective
- Selecting, developing and managing people
- Leading change
- Large negotiation deals
*ITW is an equal opportunity employer. We value our colleagues’ unique perspectives, experiences and ideas and create workplaces where everyone can develop their careers and perform to their full potential.*
*As an equal employment opportunity employer, ITW is committed to equal employment opportunity and fair treatment for employees, beginning with the hiring process and continuing through all aspects of the employment relationship.*
*All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, disability, protected Veteran status or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws.*
Compensation Information:
We believe our people are our greatest asset. That’s why we invest in creating an environment where you can thrive both personally and professionally. For more details, visit our Benefits page.
In addition, our benefits include paid vacation, sick, holiday, and parental leave. Base salary range for this position is $145,000-$190,000. This position is also eligible to participate in the management incentive program with a bonus range of 20%-30%. Please note that this salary information serves as a general guideline. Company considers various factors when extending an offer, including but not limited to the scope and responsibilities of the position, the candidate's work experience, education and training, key skills, as well as market and business considerations.
*ITW is an equal opportunity employer. We value our colleagues’ unique perspectives, experiences and ideas and create workplaces where everyone can develop their careers and perform to their full potential.*
*As an equal employment opportunity employer, ITW is committed to equal employment opportunity and fair treatment for employees, beginning with the hiring process and continuing through all aspects of the employment relationship.*
*All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, national origin, age, disability, protected Veteran status or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws.*
Salary Context
This $145K-$190K range is below the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $170K across 217 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 33,423 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At ITW Global Brands, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $154,000 based on 8,743 positions with disclosed compensation. Director-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $230,600. This role's midpoint ($167K) sits 9% above the category median. Disclosed range: $145K to $190K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $190,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $300,688. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $85,000; Mid: $147,000; Senior: $225,000; Director: $230,600; VP: $248,357.
ITW Global Brands AI Hiring
ITW Global Brands has 8 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Positions span Charlotte, NC, US, Little Rock, AR, US, Lawrenceville, GA, US. Compensation range: $190K - $190K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 7% (2,320 positions) offer remote work, while 30,984 require on-site attendance. Top AI hiring metros: New York (1,633 roles, $204,100 median); Los Angeles (1,356 roles, $179,440 median); San Francisco (1,230 roles, $240,000 median).
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 33,423 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 3,283 entry-level, 20,769 mid-level, 6,381 senior, and 2,990 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 7% of the market (2,320 positions). The remaining 30,984 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $190,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $300,688. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 21 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 24 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 264 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 33,423 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (30,275), AI Software Engineer (749), AI Product Manager (741). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (3,283) are outnumbered by mid-level (20,769) and senior (6,381) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 2,990 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 7% of all AI roles (2,320 positions), with 30,984 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $190,000. Top-quartile roles start at $244,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $300,688. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,600. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Rag (21,235 postings), Aws (11,126 postings), Rust (9,803 postings), Python (4,999 postings), Azure (3,220 postings), Gcp (2,707 postings), Prompt Engineering (1,817 postings), Openai (1,487 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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