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About This Role
Job Introduction:
Does overseeing one of the most visited departments in our stores sound exciting? Does managing a “store within a store” sound like its right up your alley? Do you have a passion for delivering an extraordinary customer service experience while working in a fast paced and friendly environment? If the thought of helping people make healthy choices in one of the fastest growing retailers is up your alley – then we need YOU to join our winning team at Sprouts Farmers Market as the Dairy Manager!
Overview of Responsibilities:
The Dairy Manager works individually to manage activities and functions of the Dairy Department to achieve and maximize sales and profits
- Give direction to clerks in the department while overseeing the presentation and sanitation standards of the Dairy Department, on the sales floor and the backroom cooler.
- Process/stock products according to Sprouts dairy standards
- Responsible for delivering outstanding customer service
- Provides overall direction, coordination, and evaluation of this department
- Control inventory to recommended stock levels by using proper ordering techniques to maximize sales and minimize stock loss
- Responsible for the proper rotation of products to control freshness; removes out\-of\-code items
- Responsible for price changes within the department
- Engage and evaluate team members through coaching, feedback, and one\-on\-one development discussions, and make recommendations on merit increases via completing the bi\-annual performance review process.
- Regularly attend and participate at in\-store meetings.
- Recruit, hire and make promotion/transfer decisions in collaboration with the Store Manager.
- Confidently exercise independent judgment to address Team Member concerns.
- Take and document corrective actions when needed, including collaboration with business and HR partners in managing performance to include coaching, counseling, progressive discipline, suspension, or termination when needed.
- Ensure maximum productivity and efficiency by creating and adjusting schedules and staffing levels.
- Communicate standards, expectations, policy changes, and product knowledge to team members.
- Lead a team that collaborates to deliver the finest quality of product, highest level of service, and the greatest experience your customers will receive.
Qualifications:
To be a Dairy Manager at Sprouts Farmers Market qualified candidates must:
- Be at least 18 years of age with a minimum of 2 years' retail grocery experience
- Have good communication skills; and the ability to give and take direction participating in a team environment
- Must have the ability to work a flexible schedule that changes as the business changes, including nights, weekends, and holidays.
- Possess a working knowledge of personnel reports, margin reports, weekly sales numbers, and financial goals.
- Have and show outgoing and friendly behavior along with a positive attitude towards Team Members and customers.
- Be able to answer phones and take special orders
- Perform general housekeeping in the department; clean and sanitize work area (including tables, floor, walls, cases, cooler, freezer, etc.)
- Be able to operate and use knives, scales, wrappers, compactors, garbage disposals, pallet jacks, and hand trucks as needed. Uses knowledge of scales and weight measures to accurately weigh and label products
- Be able to stand for up to 3 hours continuously, for a total of 8 hours per shift. This role also requires vertically transferring tray up to 5 lbs., from 7” to 64” for up to 10 hours, and vertically/horizontally transferring items up to 40 lbs., from 5” to 36”, for a distance up to 36 feet for up to 10 hours without mechanical assistance
- Adhere to all safety, health, and Weights and Measures regulations, and achieve and maintain a Food Handlers permit
Pay Range: The pay range for this position is $19\.50 \- $29\.15 / hour. Sprouts Farmers Market determines pay based on applicable experience and qualifications of the applicant. Benefits:
In addition to a rewarding career, Sprouts offers a comprehensive program to help support you and your family. These programs include:* Competitive pay
- Sick time plan that you can use to support you or your immediate families health
- Vacation accrual plan
- Opportunities for career growth
- 15% discount for you and one other family member in your household on all purchases made at Sprouts
- Flexible schedules
- Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
- 401(K) Retirement savings plan with a generous company match
- Company paid life insurance
- Contests and appreciation events throughout the year full of prizes, food and fun!
Eligibility requirements may apply for the following benefits:* Bonus based on company and/or individual performance
- Affordable benefit coverage, including medical, dental and vision
- Health Savings Account with company match
- Pre\-tax Flexible Spending Accounts for healthcare and dependent care
- Company paid short\-term disability coverage
- Paid parental leave for both mothers and fathers
- Paid holidays
Get Paid Every Day!
Sprouts Farmers Market offers DailyPay \- if you’re hired as an eligible employee, you’ll be able to transfer the money you’ve already earned at no extra cost, and get it the next business day, for free. We offer DailyPay so you don’t have to wait for payday to access the money you’ve already worked for. With DailyPay, you can see how much you’ve made every day and you can transfer your money any time before payday.
You can learn more by visiting https://www.dailypay.com/partners/sprouts\-farmers\-market/.
Why Sprouts:
Grow with us!
If you have a passion for inspiring people and a flair for fresh food, consider applying for a job at Sprouts! With a focus on customer service, our neighborhood grocery stores offer high\-quality, farm fresh produce, natural meats, plenty of scoop\-your\-own bulk goods and much more in a fun, friendly, old\-fashioned farmer’s market setting. Come grow your career in healthy living with a fast\-paced, rapidly growing company and teams that pride themselves on empowering others along their journey. At Sprouts, we’re committed to fostering an inclusive, respectful, and caring workplace culture.
Our Team Member Resource Groups (TMRGs) create spaces for connection, support, and growth. Every team member is welcome to join one or more of our five groups:* Inspiring Women at Sprouts
- Rainbow Alliance at Sprouts
- Sabor at Sprouts
- Soul at Sprouts
- Honored to Serve at Sprouts
Together, these groups celebrate diversity and empower our team to thrive. *The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of the work being performed by people assigned to this work. This is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, and requirements. Sprouts’ management reserves the right to amend and change duties, responsibilities, and requirements to meet business and organizational needs as necessary.* *Sprouts will consider for employment qualified applicants with criminal histories in a manner consistent with the requirements of the Fair Chance in Hiring Ordinance.* *California Residents: We collect information in accordance with California law, please see* *here* *for more information.*
Salary Context
This $39K-$60K range is in the lower quartile for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $100K across 15465 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 10,872 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At Sprouts Farmers Market, 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. Mid-level AI roles across all categories have a median of $147,000. This role's midpoint ($49K) sits 68% below the category median. Disclosed range: $39K to $60K.
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.
Sprouts Farmers Market AI Hiring
Sprouts Farmers Market has 2 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Positions span Goleta, CA, US, Murfreesboro, TN, US. Compensation range: $60K - $60K.
Location Context
Across all AI roles, 11% (1,212 positions) offer remote work, while 9,626 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 10,872 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 871 entry-level, 6,773 mid-level, 2,013 senior, and 1,215 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 11% of the market (1,212 positions). The remaining 9,626 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 10,872 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (9,872), AI Software Engineer (262), Data Scientist (256). 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 (871) are outnumbered by mid-level (6,773) and senior (2,013) 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 1,215 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 11% of all AI roles (1,212 positions), with 9,626 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: Python (1,782 postings), Aws (1,065 postings), Azure (796 postings), Rag (710 postings), Gcp (617 postings), Pytorch (602 postings), Prompt Engineering (516 postings), Tensorflow (511 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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