engineer lead, Backend Services- ST; Seattle, WA

Starbucks Coffee Company•Seattle, WA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

If you are passionate about building and supporting resilient, performant and scalable services , we want to hear from you! As a lead engineer, you will provide technical leadership for mission-critical systems, driving architecture decisions, setting engineering standards, and mentoring engineers while remaining hands-on. The Fulfill and Manage Orders engineering team builds and maintains the software platform that provides best-in-class order fulfilment services and applications in 10,000+ coffeehouses and enables world class customer service. This is a unique opportunity to bring your technical expertise and leadership skills to make a positive impact and contribute directly to the Starbucks strategy.

Requirements

8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant experience leading complex backend systems.
Minimum 2 years of experience as a tech lead or staff-level engineer influencing multiple teams.
Strong expertise in C# and .NET (Core/8+) for building production-grade services.
Deep, hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure, including services such as: Azure App Service / Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) & Azure Service Bus / Event Grid / Event Hubs
Proven experience designing and operating highly scalable, distributed systems in production.
Experience with edge computing scenarios or systems spanning cloud and constrained/remote environments.
Solid understanding of networking, security, and distributed system fundamentals.
Excellent communication skills and the ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly.
You can dive into code and systems design, raise the technical bar through thoughtful reviews, and make pragmatic trade-offs that balance quality, speed, and risk
You use agentic AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub CoPilot or similar) in your daily workflow and have opinions about how to integrate them into a team's development process
Proven track record of end-to-end service ownership including on-call support
Effective in partnering with product management, cyber security, architecture and support engineers

Nice To Haves

Experience with Kubernetes, containers, and service meshes.
Familiarity with IoT, CDN, or edge platforms (e.g., Azure IoT Edge, Azure Front Door, CDN architectures).
Experience with event-driven architectures, CQRS, and streaming systems.

Responsibilities

Lead the architecture and design of scalable, resilient backend services running across cloud and edge environments.
Make and guide critical technical decisions involving system design, data models, APIs, messaging, and infrastructure.
Drive adoption of cloud-native and edge-aware patterns (microservices, event-driven systems, caching, eventual consistency, offline/low-latency scenarios).
Ensure systems meet availability, performance, scalability, and security requirements.
Design, develop, and review high-quality .NET (C#) code for backend services.
Build and evolve services running on Microsoft Azure, leveraging managed services and infrastructure-as-code.
Optimize systems for high throughput, low latency, and global distribution.
Troubleshoot complex production issues across distributed systems.
Design systems that operate reliably across edge and cloud, including synchronization, data replication, and failure handling.
Address challenges such as network variability, partial connectivity, and device/resource constraints.
Balance compute, storage, and latency trade-offs between edge and cloud components.
Establish and uphold engineering best practices: code quality, testing, observability, documentation, and on-call readiness.
Lead design reviews and provide thoughtful, constructive code reviews.
Champion reliability practices such as monitoring, alerting, SLIs/SLOs, and incident response.
Mentor and coach engineers, helping them grow technically and professionally.
Partner closely with product, program management, and operations to deliver solutions that meet customer and business needs.
Influence without authority across teams and contribute to a culture of ownership and continuous improvement.

Benefits

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.