Distinguished Engineer - GaME (Geographies & Marketplace Experiences)

Nike•Beaverton, OR

15h

About The Position

Nike is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to define the technical future of its global marketplace and digital consumer ecosystem. This senior technical leader will shape the strategy for consumer experiences and platforms including Nike App, SNKRS, Nike.com, marketplace and partner experiences, personalization, commerce services, and emerging AI-driven shopping experiences. The role serves as a force multiplier across engineering organizations, influencing architecture, technology strategy, product innovation, platform modernization, AI adoption, and operational excellence. The Distinguished Engineer will guide the transition toward AI-powered, agent-driven commerce, establishing architecture and adoption patterns for AI capabilities across Nike’s digital ecosystem. The role will also shape marketplace and commerce architecture, advance cloud economics and engineering efficiency, improve developer productivity through AI-enabled software development, and establish technical standards for reliability, security, resilience, and observability. This position reports within the GaME technology organization and partners closely with Engineering Directors, Product Directors, Distinguished Engineers, Principal Engineers, Data & AI leaders, Architecture teams, and business leadership across Nike. It collaborates across Nike App, SNKRS, Nike.com, Marketplace & Partner Experiences, Consumer Services, Personalization Platforms, Data & AI Platforms, Enterprise Architecture, Global Technology Platforms, and Geographies and Marketplace business leadership.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field; suitable combinations of education, experience, and training will be accepted.
15+ years of software engineering experience with significant hands-on technical leadership.
Recognized technical authority within a large-scale technology organization.
Proven success driving architecture across multiple complex products and platforms and experience operating at internet-scale consumer workloads.
Deep expertise in distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and cloud-native design.
Strong knowledge of modern public cloud technologies and platform engineering practices.
Demonstrated success leading large-scale architecture modernization efforts.
Experience driving measurable improvements in reliability, scalability, performance, and engineering productivity.
Significant experience designing and delivering AI/ML-powered applications and platforms.
Experience with GenAI, LLM integration, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), agent architectures, and AI platform capabilities.
Understanding of AI governance, model observability, evaluation frameworks, and responsible AI principles.
Experience applying AI to customer experiences and internal engineering productivity.
Strong business acumen and ability to connect technical investments to measurable business outcomes.
Exceptional communication and influence skills; ability to build alignment across organizations without direct authority.
Proven ability to mentor senior engineers, Principal Engineers, and future technical leaders.
Experience leading through ambiguity and solving highly complex organizational and technical challenges.

Nice To Haves

Experience with digital commerce, marketplaces, or retail technology.
Experience scaling global consumer-facing applications serving millions of users.
Expertise in cloud cost optimization and FinOps practices.
Experience with experimentation platforms, recommendation systems, personalization engines, or search technologies.
Active participation in technical communities, open-source initiatives, or industry thought leadership.

Responsibilities

Define and drive the long-term technology vision for GaME and partner with engineering, product, design, and architecture leaders on a multi-year technology roadmap.
Influence architectural decisions across portfolios and domains, lead cross-functional technical initiatives, and advise senior executives on emerging technology trends and investments.
Lead architecture and adoption of AI capabilities, including recommendations, personalization, search, conversational commerce, shopper assistants, content generation, and agentic experiences.
Establish best practices for responsible AI, model lifecycle management, prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and AI observability.
Drive integration of GenAI and agent technologies into consumer experiences, developer tooling, and operational workflows, and help Nike products and services work within emerging AI shopping ecosystems.
Shape architecture for Nike App, SNKRS, Nike.com, and marketplace platforms, supporting direct-to-consumer, partner, wholesale, and future marketplace business models.
Design scalable systems for global launches, high-demand events, promotions, inventory visibility, and transactional workloads; simplify architecture while enabling product innovation.
Own technical strategy for cloud efficiency and FinOps; optimize cloud spend, reduce waste and infrastructure costs, improve utilization, and simplify operations without sacrificing reliability, security, or customer experience.
Establish standards for performance optimization, workload efficiency, sustainable scaling, and measurable value from technology investments.
Lead adoption of AI-assisted software development, automation, intelligent tooling, and platform engineering; transform software development lifecycle processes and improve delivery velocity without compromising quality.
Establish engineering standards across architecture, security, resilience, and observability; improve reliability of mission-critical consumer experiences.
Champion platform engineering, event-driven architectures, cloud-native development, and site reliability engineering; lead technical reviews and help teams resolve complex performance, scalability, and reliability issues.
Track AI, cloud computing, digital commerce, and platform architecture trends; evaluate emerging technologies for competitive advantage and represent Nike in technical communities, conferences, and industry forums.
Build relationships across Distinguished Engineer and Principal Engineer communities and mentor senior engineers and future technical leaders.