Job description

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 with every 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 applicantaccommodation@starbucks.com or 1(888) 611-2258.

Requirements

Must-haves

Now Brewing – Data Platform and Services Engineering Leaders! #tobeapartner
Are you passionate about driving data-driven innovation?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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

Nice-to-haves

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Platform: eightfold
Effort: medium

Benefits

Benefits detected in the listing.

Dental

Vision

401(K)

Parental Leave