Now Brewing – Data Platform and Services Engineering Leaders! #tobeapartner

From the beginning, Starbucks set out to be a different kind of company. One that not only celebrated coffee and the rich tradition, but that also brought a feeling of connection. We are known for developing extraordinary leaders who share this passion and are guided by their service to others.

Are you passionate about driving data-driven innovation?

We're seeking a talented Principal Engineer to join our team and revolutionize our data capabilities at Starbucks! This is your chance to make a monumental impact by leading the charge in streamlining and innovating our data platform and services across the enterprise, from corporate and supply chain to our customer, partner and in-store experience.

Become the leader of a centralized enterprise data management team, ensuring real-time data access and unparalleled accuracy across all our channels.
Lead the foundation for enterprise data management – your work will pave the way for future innovation at Starbucks.
Champion seamless API integration across our vast digital ecosystem such as commerce, mobile and in-store order, digital drive through, in-store digital menu board, corporate and supply chain, fostering a truly connected enterprise experience.

If you're a leader who thrives in a fast-paced environment and gets energized by tackling complex challenges, we want to hear from you!

As a principal engineer of the Data Platform and Services engineering team, you’ll collaborate with solution architects and engineering managers, tackle toughest technical problems in the team to lead our data initiatives and drive technical excellence.You’ll lead a group of passionate engineers in building, sustaining, and enhancing critical data platforms used by Starbucks to help drive customer, store, and partner connections and to gain business efficiencies.You’ll play a key role in architecting, designing and developing advanced data platforms, fostering composable design and architecture, and ensuring our solutions are secure, performant, resilient, scalable, flexible, and extensible.

The Principal Engineer of Data Platform and Services will be responsible for:

Communicates highly complex technical ideas, architectural strategies, and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Establishes strong cross-functional, collaborative relationships with business, product, architecture, security, and technology partners to drive alignment and execution.
Provides technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams, proactively removing technical barriers and resolving complex development and production issues.
Champions AI adoption across the software development lifecycle, leveraging AI-assisted engineering and agentic capabilities to improve developer productivity, code quality, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, and operational efficiency
Identifies and drives opportunities to embed AI and automation into engineering workflows and platform capabilities, reducing manual effort and accelerating reliable delivery.
Establishes engineering standards and continuously improves build, test, release, and deployment processes through automation.
Conducts research and technical evaluations of emerging technologies, including AI, data, cloud, observability, and platform engineering capabilities, and provides recommendations based on business and technology needs.
Ensures application, data, and infrastructure architectures are scalable, resilient, secure, maintainable, and compliant with company standards and engineering practices.
Implements technologies in accordance with Information Security principles, with particular focus on protecting highly sensitive and regulated data.
Designs and enables highly available platforms while driving automation across operational processes to improve reliability, recovery, and engineering efficiency.
Implements deep telemetry, observability, and measurable success metrics to continuously assess platform health, performance, reliability, and customer impact.
Establishes proactive monitoring and intelligent alerting across platforms to ensure continuous availability and operational continuity of critical systems.
Leverages AI-driven insights, automation, and observability to enable proactive issue detection, faster root-cause analysis, and continuous platform optimization.
Drives technical modernization and simplification, reducing technical debt and improving scalability, maintainability, and long-term platform sustainability.
Ensures solutions and engineering practices comply with company policies and applicable legal, regulatory, privacy, and security requirements, including PCI.

Basic Qualifications

Education (minimum education level, degree or certification necessary):
10-15 years of professional industry experience with software development and platform management
5 years of leading teams of six or more software developers
3 years of demonstrating technical leadership across multiple platforms
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Preferred Qualifications

Skills (minimum skills required):

Demonstrated adoption of AI-assisted software engineering practices, leveraging GenAI, AI coding assistants, and agentic workflows to accelerate software development, code generation, unit testing, code reviews, troubleshooting, documentation, and vulnerability remediation while maintaining strong engineering, security, and quality standards.
Ability to identify and drive AI-enabled automation opportunities across the software development lifecycle and engineering operations, using AI to improve developer productivity, reduce repetitive work, accelerate problem resolution, and enhance overall engineering effectiveness.
9+ years of hands-on software engineering experience with Java, Spring Boot, CQRS, event-driven architectures, Kafka, and Spark, along with strong experience in Kubernetes or comparable container orchestration platforms.
7+ years of experience designing and delivering highly scalable, resilient, responsive, and message-driven microservices for large-scale, distributed, mission-critical platforms. Demonstrated expertise in distributed system design, performance optimization, troubleshooting complex production issues, and automating repetitive engineering and operational tasks.
5+ years of experience owning and managing systems of varying scale and complexity, including large distributed platforms with end-to-end operational responsibility, production reliability, availability, observability, and continuous improvement.
Strong database and data architecture knowledge, with experience across relational and NoSQL technologies such as Oracle, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase, including the associated development, operational, and performance optimization toolsets.
Deep understanding of enterprise security, RESTful API design, and cloud-native engineering practices, with hands-on experience designing and deploying secure, scalable workloads in cloud environments such as AWS and Azure.
Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with the ability to clearly articulate architectural concepts, engineering rationale, tradeoffs, and complex technical challenges to both technical and non-technical audiences.

As a Starbucks partner, you (and your family) will have access to medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, and other voluntary insurance benefits. Partners have access to short-term and long-term disability, paid parental leave, family expansion reimbursement, paid vacation from date of hire*, sick time (accrued at 1 hour for every 25 hours worked), eight paid holidays, and two personal days per year. Starbucks also offers eligible partners participation in a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match, a discounted company stock program (S.I.P.), Starbucks equity program (Bean Stock), incentivized emergency savings, and financial well-being tools. Additionally, Starbucks offers 100% upfront tuition coverage for a first-time bachelor’s degree through Arizona State University’s online program via the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, student loan management resources, and access to other educational opportunities. You will also have access to backup care and DACA reimbursement. Starbucks will comply with any applicable state and local laws regarding employee leave benefits, including, but not limited to providing time off pursuant to the Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act, and in accordance with its plans and policies. This list is subject to change depending on collective bargaining in locations where partners have a certified bargaining representative. For additional information regarding partner perks and more detailed information about benefits, go to starbucksbenefits.com.

*If you are working in CA, CO, IL, LA, ME, MA, NE, ND or RI, you will accrue vacation up to a maximum of 120 hours (190 in CA) for roles below director and 200 hours (316 in CA) for roles at director or above. For roles in other states, you will be granted vacation time starting at 120 hours annually for roles below director and 200 hours annually for roles director and above.

The actual base pay offered to the successful candidate will be based on multiple factors, including but not limited to job-related knowledge/skills, experience, geographical location, and internal equity. At Starbucks, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at the high end of the range for their role, and compensation decisions are dependent upon the facts and circumstances of each position and candidate.

We believe we do our best work when we're together, which is why we're onsite four days a week.

Join us and inspire withevery cup. Apply today!

Starbucks Coffee Company is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with all federal, state and local ordinances. Starbucks Coffee Company is committed to offering reasonable accommodations to job applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please contact us at [email protected] or 1(888) 611-2258.

About the company

Starbucks runs coffeehouses around the world that serve espresso drinks, brewed coffee, tea, and food, and it roasts the arabica coffee its stores sell. It grew from a single Seattle shop selling beans into the world's largest coffeehouse chain, and it helped make Italian-style espresso drinks such as lattes an everyday habit in the United States. Customers order at the counter, at drive-throughs, or ahead through the Starbucks app, whose rewards program trades points for free drinks and food. The company earns money from cafés it operates itself and from fees paid by licensed stores in places such as airports and grocery stores. Starbucks was founded in 1971 and is based in Seattle.

Company Size

10,001+

Company Stage

IPO

Headquarters

Seattle, Washington

Founded

1971

Get referred to Starbucks

See people who can refer or advise you

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

Customers are coming back: North American store transactions rose 4.5% in the quarter ended June 2026.
Baristas get more help: the Green Apron service model added over $500 million in extra store staffing hours.
Momentum lifted the outlook: in July 2026, Starbucks raised its yearly comparable sales growth forecast to slightly above 6%.

What critics are saying

Corporate jobs keep shrinking: Starbucks cut 300 U.S. support roles and closed Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas offices in May 2026.
Union talks drag on: about 600 unionized cafés still lacked a first contract as of March 2026.
Extra staffing squeezes profit: operating margins fell nearly by half after the turnaround began in late 2024.

What makes Starbucks unique

Starbucks breeds its own coffee trees: its Costa Rica research farm developed rust-resistant varieties it gives farmers free.
Grocery sales are prepaid: Nestlé paid Starbucks about $7 billion upfront for rights to sell its packaged coffee worldwide.
Starbucks licenses rather than runs China: Boyu Capital's joint venture operates its 7,991 Chinese cafés under Starbucks' brand.

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Benefits

Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Life Insurance
Disability Insurance
Paid Vacation
Paid Sick Leave
Paid Holidays
Parental Leave
401(k) Retirement Plan
401(k) Company Match
Stock Options

Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

1 year growth

2 year growth

Yahoo Finance

Oct 12th, 2026

Costco, Coca-Cola, Starbucks: 5 brands keep pricing power as 79% of shoppers trade down

As 79% of consumers trade down, according to a McKinsey report, five brands are keeping their pricing power: Costco, Coca-Cola, On Holding, Starbucks, and Procter & Gamble. Pricing power means a company can charge more without hurting demand. Costco raised its annual membership fee in 2025 from $60 to $65, yet renewals stayed strong. Its fourth-quarter sales rose 11.2% to $93.9 billion. Coca-Cola's second-quarter sales rose 6%, and earnings per share (EPS) climbed 30% to $0.86. On Holding's gross margin improved from 61.5% to 65.4%. Starbucks' global comparable sales rose 7.9% in its third quarter, and EPS grew 86% to $0.91. Procter & Gamble's sales rose 2% in its fourth quarter, helped by price increases.

CNBC

Oct 5th, 2026

Starbucks opens stores in Xinjiang despite US forced labour concerns and political backlash

Starbucks opened two stores in Xinjiang, a region where Western governments accuse China of human rights abuses. The move came after Starbucks sold a 60% stake in its China operations to private equity firm Boyu Capital in April. The US House Select Committee on China called the decision "shocking and morally bankrupt" and demanded the stores close. China's Foreign Ministry rejected the criticism, calling US claims of genocide "a blatant lie". Analysts suggest Boyu weighed Washington's reaction but prioritised domestic commercial opportunity. The firm aims to expand from roughly 8,000 stores to as many as 20,000 in China. More than a dozen American brands, including McDonald's, Tesla, and KFC, have already entered Xinjiang, with expansion accelerating since 2023 despite US labour restrictions.

CNBC

Sep 16th, 2026

Starbucks weighs $3B sale of majority stake in Japan business

Starbucks is considering selling a majority stake in its Japan business in a deal that could value the operation at around $3 billion, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The coffee chain has solicited pitches from financial advisers and could launch a formal sale process in the fourth quarter. Starbucks Japan operates 1,883 stores, representing nearly 9% of the company's global footprint as of September 2025. The potential sale comes as CEO Brian Niccol reshapes the company's global portfolio to restore profitability. Starbucks took full control of its Japan business in 2014, buying out partner Sazaby League for $914 million. The move follows last year's sale of control in Starbucks China to Boyu Capital, valued at $4 billion. A Starbucks spokesperson said the company continually assesses the best structure to create shareholder value.

Yahoo Finance

Jul 31st, 2026

2 cash-producing stocks worth researching and 1 to avoid

This article examines three companies based on their cash-generating capabilities and investment potential. Starbucks, with a 9.5% trailing 12-month free cash flow margin, faces challenges including declining same-store sales and a projected 1.6% sales decline. Operating margins fell by 3 percentage points as expenses increased relative to revenue. The stock trades at 35.5x forward P/E. Inter Parfums, which manufactures fragrances for brands like Kate Spade and Van Cleef & Arpels, shows stronger fundamentals with a 14.4% free cash flow margin and 59.7% gross margin. The company trades at 24.8x forward P/E. Oscar Health, a technology-focused health insurer, demonstrates the strongest performance with 21% free cash flow margin. The company achieved 42.6% annual revenue growth over two years and 31.5% annual earnings per share growth over four years. Its free cash flow margin expanded by 19.9 percentage points over five years.

Yahoo Finance

Jul 20th, 2026

Luckin Coffee expands to New York with 33,600 locations, threatening Starbucks' market share

Luckin Coffee, China's massive chain with 33,600 locations globally, is expanding into New York City. The company emphasises speed, novelty, and value through cashless transactions. Starbucks already faces significant competition in the US market. McDonald's operates 14,000 American locations whilst Dunkin' Donuts has 10,000, creating 24,000 rival stores before Luckin's arrival. Smaller chains like Tim Hortons and Caribou Coffee add over 1,000 more locations. The competitive pressure shows in Starbucks' share performance. Over five years, Starbucks stock has fallen 16% whilst the S&P 500 gained 69%. Over the past year, Starbucks rose 13% compared to the S&P's 18% increase. Food & Wine expects Luckin Coffee to expand rapidly across the United States.

Starbucks

Principal Engineer, Data Platform and Services

About the job

Basic Qualifications

Preferred Qualifications

About the company

Get referred to Starbucks

Simplify's Take

What believers are saying

What critics are saying

What makes Starbucks unique

Benefits

Growth & Insights and Company News

6 month growth

1 year growth

2 year growth