Principal Engineer

Company Background:

Established in 1928, Genuine Parts Company is a leading global service provider of automotive and industrial replacement parts and value-added solutions. Our Automotive Parts Group operates across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australasia, France, the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Portugal, while our Industrial Parts Group serves customers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Australasia. We keep the world moving with a vast network of over 10,700 locations spanning 17 countries supported by more than 63,000 teammates. Learn more at genpt.com.

Position Purpose:

Seeking world-class talent to join the world’s leading distributor of automotive and industrial replacement parts and value-added services operating 5,500+ locations and servicing more than 20,000 locations in the U.S and Canada. Specifically, this role will function as the Principal Engineer of a newly formed team of Engineers to build the next generation commerce platforms at GPC.  Working with a highly talented team, you'll play a key role to build and run one of the world’s largest automotive and industrial replacement parts operations. 

This is a technical leadership role responsible for defining and guiding the architecture, engineering standards, and technology direction for store systems across NAPA. The role will provide hands-on technical leadership across point-of-sale, store operations, edge/device platforms, integrations, reliability, and modernization efforts that improve Corporate Owned Store Associate, Customer, and Independent Store Owner experiences.

This individual must be a technologist and engineer at heart, comfortable setting technical direction while staying close enough to the work to guide execution, remove complexity, and raise engineering quality. The ideal candidate will bring deep technical judgment across store platforms, integrations, cloud-native services, distributed systems, and operational resilience, while helping teams make pragmatic architecture decisions that scale across a complex store environment.

Close collaboration and alignment with store operations, product, application development, infrastructure, security, data, and business teams will be required. As such, exceptional abilities in building strong working relationships, influencing across teams, and communicating complex technical direction in a clear, business-relevant way will be required. The ability to mentor senior engineers, establish technical standards, and elevate engineering practices across Store systems will be critical.

Responsibilities: 

• Define and drive the long-term technical vision, architecture, and engineering standards for Store systems, ensuring alignment with business priorities, product roadmaps, operational needs, and enterprise technology strategy.

• Develop strategic technical initiatives that modernize Store systems, improve reliability and performance, simplify operations, and enable scalable capabilities across company-owned and independently owned stores.

• Engage with vendors, enterprise architecture, infrastructure, security, and industry leaders to evaluate technologies that strengthen store platforms, edge computing, device management, integration patterns, and operational resilience.

• Foster out-of-the-box thinking within the team to encourage innovative approaches to complex problems, leading to more creative and effective solutions.

• Analyze the end-to-end store technology value chain, including point-of-sale, pricing, inventory, catalog, payments, order management, fulfillment, delivery, device management, and support processes, to identify opportunities to reduce friction and improve store execution.

• Collaborate with senior leaders to integrate Store systems architecture and modernization priorities with business, product, operations, security, data, and enterprise technology roadmaps.

• Define and guide enterprise integration patterns, messaging frameworks, event-driven services, APIs, and cloud-native architecture that enable resilient, scalable, and observable Store systems.

• Design and guide distributed applications for remote discovery, monitoring, configuration, lifecycle management, and support of store devices, edge infrastructure, and IoT-enabled capabilities.

• Define key performance indicators for Store systems, including reliability, performance, availability, incident reduction, store adoption, operational efficiency, transaction success, and business impact; monitor the effectiveness of technical initiatives against those outcomes.

• Implement and continuously improve the technical standards, engineering patterns, observability practices, automation, and operational tooling required to support reliable and scalable Store systems.

• Communicates the architecture to the stakeholders and collaborates and coordinates with existing domain architects in the formalization and adoption of IT standards and procedures

• Lead architecture, design, code, and operational readiness reviews with engineering teams to ensure Store systems are secure, scalable, reliable, supportable, and aligned with enterprise standards.

• Provides oversight on delivery to ensure industry best practices, standards, automation, quality, timeliness, operational readiness, continuous improvement and cost-effective solutions

• Partner with Unified Experience, Product, UX, Architecture, and Engineering teams to define how Store Systems capabilities are exposed through unified associate, customer, call center, and owner experiences.

• Own technical leadership for Store systems modernization by partnering with product and engineering teams to evolve legacy platforms, reduce operational complexity, improve integration quality, and create reusable patterns that accelerate delivery across store capabilities.

• Other duties as assigned.

Location:

• GPC has two work locations to choose from, Duluth or Atlanta office.

• We offer a Flexible Work Policy that permits eligible employees to work on a hybrid remote schedule.

Desired Qualifications & Experiences:

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, related field, or equivalent experience.

• 10+ years’ experience in software engineering and technology, with 5+ years in a senior technical leadership role guiding architecture, engineering standards, and delivery for complex enterprise platforms, preferably in retail, store operations, commerce, supply chain, or distributed systems environments.

• Expert knowledge of modern software development practices, including Agile, DevOps, Lean, Kanban, and SAFe, with experience scaling delivery practices across large engineering teams.

• Hands-on experience with modern cloud-native engineering stacks, including Java/Spring Boot, Python, Node.js, GCP/AWS/Azure, APIs, microservices, Pub/Sub or equivalent messaging, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, observability, CI/CD automation, and real-time processing pipelines.

• Experience leading enterprise-scale integrations across Store systems, POS platforms, store operations workflows, WMS, OMS, TMS, ERP, warehouse automation, payments, pricing, inventory, catalog, carrier, automation, and customer-facing platforms.

• Deep understanding of store technology platforms, distributed systems, edge computing, device management, IoT-enabled store devices, APIs, event-driven architecture, observability, and operational support models.

• Strong engineering discipline across data integration patterns, design patterns, test-driven development, unit testing, performance engineering, destructive testing, and scalable quality practices.

• Experience designing or defining lightweight warehouse management capabilities that support store and fulfillment operations.

• Preferred experience with AI-enabled engineering capabilities, including policy enforcement, LLM routing, and multi-agent orchestration frameworks in secure enterprise environments.

• Experience standardizing operational templates across multi-store, multi-warehouse, and 3PL networks

• Demonstrated ability to deliver measurable business impact, including reduced cost, faster onboarding, improved throughput, higher reliability, and better operational efficiency.

• AI-enabled engineering tools and practices supporting productivity, documentation, testing, analysis, coding, prototyping, and operational support.

• Excellent oral and written communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and business impacts to engineering teams, senior leaders, business partners, and operational stakeholders.

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GPC conducts its business without regard to sex, race, creed, color, religion, marital status, national origin, citizenship status, age, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, disability, military status, status as a veteran, or any other protected characteristic. GPC's policy is to recruit, hire, train, promote, assign, transfer and terminate employees based on their own ability, achievement, experience and conduct and other legitimate business reasons.