Distinguished Engineer, Core Engineering Services

Herbalife•,

1d•Remote

About The Position

As Distinguished Engineer for Core Engineering Services, you will design, build, and own the platform foundation that every engineering team at Herbalife builds on. This is the organization's top individual contributor engineering role, sitting at the intersection of deep technical mastery and enterprise-wide influence. You will set the technical vision, author and maintain the Core Services Architecture Standards, shape multi-year platform strategy alongside VP and C-suite leadership, and serve as the escalation point for the most complex cross-cutting technical challenges across the engineering organization. You will be the founding member of the Core Engineering Services team, which sits inside the broader Digital Technology organization driving Herbalife's transformation into a modern commerce and engagement platform. The team is responsible for the platform foundation all product engineering teams build on, spanning 95+ global markets and five million independent distributors. You will work closely with engineering and technology leadership, product engineering teams, Security, DevOps, and the Enterprise Architecture function. This is a senior individual contributor role with no direct people management responsibilities. The Distinguished Engineer exercises broad organizational influence through technical leadership, architectural decision-making, mentorship of principal and staff engineers, and cross-functional partnership rather than through direct reporting relationships.

Requirements

15+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years operating at a principal, staff, or distinguished engineer level: defining enterprise-wide standards, driving cross-organizational adoption, and owning platform-level outcomes at scale.
Deep, hands-on experience building platform or developer experience infrastructure: CI/CD systems, local development environments, shared libraries, service scaffolding, or internal developer platforms.
Demonstrated experience shaping multi-year technical strategy alongside VP and executive-level technology leadership, including roadmap co-authorship and build-vs-buy decision making at enterprise scale.
Experience with container-based local development and Kubernetes in production: Docker/Podman Compose for local stacks, GKE or equivalent for cloud deployment, Helm or Kustomize for manifest management.
Working knowledge of distributed systems patterns: event-driven architecture, Kafka or equivalent message streaming, synchronous vs. asynchronous tradeoffs, and service-to-service authentication (mTLS, JWT propagation, Workload Identity).
Hands-on experience with observability tooling: OpenTelemetry instrumentation, structured logging, Prometheus-style metrics, and distributed tracing backends.
A track record of writing architecture documentation that engineers actively use: clear, opinionated, and maintained as living standards rather than one-time artifacts.
A demonstrated history of mentoring principal and staff engineers and growing technical talent through direct collaboration, sponsorship, and technical community building.
External presence: conference presentations, published technical writing, open source contributions, or equivalent evidence of recognized expertise beyond any single organization.
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field required.
Strong command of API gateway patterns and hands-on experience with at least one major gateway (Kong, Envoy, nginx, AWS API Gateway, or equivalent); strong grasp of trunk-based development and feature flagging (LaunchDarkly or equivalent).
Fluency in multiple backend service languages, with the ability to evaluate tradeoffs and author reference library implementations that feel natural across language ecosystems.
Proven experience with API contract testing methodologies and tooling (Pact or equivalent); familiarity with zero-trust service-to-service authentication and secrets management.
Strong cross-functional communication and influence skills: able to build consensus around technical direction through quality of reasoning and to represent technical positions persuasively to non-technical executive stakeholders.

Nice To Haves

Master's degree preferred.
Equivalent work experience and demonstrated technical achievement considered in lieu of formal education.

Responsibilities

Design, build, and own the Core Engineering Services platform: monorepo structure, shared CI/CD pipeline templates, a local development environment with production parity, golden path service templates, and a service manifest standard that makes services self-describing.
Author and evolve the Core Services Architecture Standards, the definitive document governing how all new backend services at Herbalife are built, tested, deployed, and observed; act as the senior IC escalation point for the most complex cross-cutting technical challenges across the engineering organization.
Shape the multi-year platform and backend engineering strategy alongside VP and C-suite technology leadership; use quantitative analysis to drive platform investment decisions, build-vs-buy evaluations, and vendor consolidation recommendations backed by data.
Define and own the developer experience end-to-end: pre-commit quality gates, CI security scanning, API versioning standards, contract testing strategy, and observability tooling aligned to OpenTelemetry across all supported service languages.
Represent Herbalife's engineering capabilities externally at industry conferences, vendor summits, and community forums; author public-facing technical content that positions Herbalife as a modern engineering organization and supports senior talent acquisition.
Teach, mentor, and sponsor principal and staff engineers; shape technical hiring criteria at the principal and staff levels, and build cross-functional bridges with Security, Product, DevOps, and Enterprise Architecture.
Additional duties as assigned.