engineer lead, (Java Springboot) - ST Seattle WA

Starbucks Coffee Company • Seattle, WA

1d • $149,500 - $249,100 • Hybrid

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• 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

Nice To Haves

• 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
• 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.
• 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

Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Benefits

• medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, and other voluntary insurance benefits
• 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
• two personal days per year
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match
• discounted company stock program (S.I.P.)
• Starbucks equity program (Bean Stock)
• incentivized emergency savings
• financial well-being tools
• 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
• access to other educational opportunities
• backup care
• DACA reimbursement

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Manager