Lead Engineer
Starbucks
Lead Engineer
Starbucks
Runs coffeehouses and licenses its coffee brand
Job Summary and Mission
This position contributes to Starbucks success by leading a Platform Engineering team with strong focus on platform automation and security. As engineer lead in platform development and engineering, you are responsible for leading a team of software developers through planning, delivery, and operations of solutions. You are also responsible for the evolvement, delivery and support of technology strategy and roadmaps for new and existing applications and platforms. This role requires hands-on technical ability, domain proficiency, platform depth, and leadership. Models and acts in accordance with Starbucks guiding principles.
Summary of Key Responsibilities
Responsibilities and essential job functions include but are not limited to the following:
Leadership – Setting goals for the work group, developing organizational capability, and modeling how we work together:
•Leads the technical team through the solution design process. Leverages and develops talent on the team through all phases of project efforts, including requirements gathering, assessment and backlog refinement. Shapes and guides systems approach, manages project initiation, technical design and development efforts.
•Ensures platform has appropriate design patterns and coding standards in place. Directs team toward secure, durable, scalable, flexible, and accessible solutions that proactively mitigate against production support issues.
•Identifies and communicates key responsibilities and practices to ensure the immediate team of direct reports promotes a successful attitude, confidence in leadership, and teamwork to achieve business results.
•Accountable for delivery of development and operational efforts of the team by ensuring efforts are staffed, structured, budgeted and prioritized appropriately.
•Leads an engineering team with Platform Security Automation focus to comply with Starbucks Global Cyber Security requirements.
•Provide Security Architecture Design Pattern and engineering services for common platform components.
•Provide consultative services to the application product teams.
•Interface with Starbucks Cloud and Global Cyber Security teams representing our platforms.
Platform Stewardship – Championing platform efforts to promote platform evolvement and stability to support business needs:
•Partners with cross functional teams, such as Infrastructure, Security, Architecture, QA and key Development teams, to strengthen and elevate the platform from a technology perspective. Successfully sees designs and solutions through enterprise processes and governance to ensure compliant, secure and supportable solutions.
•Drives adoption of self-service capabilities and maintains documentation that helps developers work with the platform efficiently.
•Monitors developer experience and platform adoption. Works to identify friction points before they become workarounds.
Production Support for application and platform components:
•Defines and maintains processes, procedures, and expectations for team's production support responsibilities.
•Ensures platform application and platform support documentation is in place.
•Leads team through high severity security related operational incidents.
Basic Qualifications
•6+ years of professional industry experience with software development and operations
•3-5 years of leading or managing systems or application development projects of all sizes and complexities, including large distributed systems
•3-5 years of leading or managing small technical teams
•Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
Preferred Qualifications
Technical Proficiency
•Working knowledge of AI-enabled development tools and workflows (GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar). Experience applying these tools in day-to-day engineering work preferred.
•Familiarity with integrating LLM capabilities into platform tooling, such as automation scripts, chatops, or alerting workflows.
•Exposure to MLOps practices or supporting teams running AI workloads on container platforms.
•Awareness of AI-related security considerations including prompt injection, model provenance, and data handling.
•Ability to lead a team of technical experts that cohesively build and operate secure, durable, flexible, accessible solutions. Requires an understanding of relevant development languages, tools, frameworks, utilities and technical dependencies.
•Recognizes, values and champions high quality, reusable software with minimal defects on the team.
•Ability to build automation tools for security processes for various automation pipeline.
•Aptitude to pick up new technologies and trends, as they become relevant for the business and our platforms.
•Expert in understanding of implications tradeoffs from design and implementation architecture choices toward building secure, scalable, durable, flexible, accessible solutions.
•Strong knowledge of Azure or AWS or GCP or public Cloud Computing concepts.
•Strong knowledge in best practices for:
•Architecture and design
•Platform and infrastructure, including Internal Developer Platform patterns
•Application and PaaS services
•Monitoring, auditing, observability (familiarity with OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing), and operations
•In-depth working experience in a DevOps engineering culture; one or more DevOps, Orchestration/Configuration Management and Continuous Integration technology (e.g. Docker/Kubernetes, Azure DevOps, Ansible, Terraform, ELK, Datadog etc.)
•Experience with GitOps workflows and related tooling (ArgoCD, Flux) is a plus.
•Familiarity with service mesh concepts, ingress patterns, and Kubernetes operational concerns.
•Security automation experience: integrating scanning into CI/CD, secrets management (Vault, Azure Key Vault), and supply chain security practices (SBOMs, artifact signing).
•Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat)
•One or more Web and Application Server technologies (e.g. Apache HTTPD, Apache Tomcat, Nginx, NGF, Apigee)
•Networking protocols such as HTTPS, DNS and TCP/IP
•Expert in analyzing and troubleshooting applications
Domain Proficiency
•Broad and deep understanding of relevant platform and applications capabilities, including established API's, system activity components, process flows, the underlying data model, implementation specifics of important business rules, batch jobs, user interface components, and application configuration.
•Familiarity and curiosity in the business context and trends, as well as the business customers' opportunities. Awareness of the functional aspects of the solution.
Interpersonal Skills
•Ability to lead and influence cross functional teams that include architects, analysts, developers and QA analysts
•Ability to articulate ideas, using facts and data, for solutions to both technical and business communities
•Excellent verbal and written communication skills
•Ability to influence and negotiate strategy and roadmaps in planning exercises
•Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
•Ability to balance multiple priorities and meet deadlines
•Ability to make timely and effective decisions using a mixture of intuition, analysis, experience and judgment
•Experience working with distributed or hybrid teams is helpful
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.
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.
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