Manager, Software Engineering

Nike • Beaverton, OR

2d

About The Position

Nike is seeking an AI-Native Engineering Manager to lead the full-stack team responsible for its Athlete Data Platform. The team builds and operates the services, schemas, mobile integrations, and data pipelines that maintain a trustworthy, consent-aware athlete record and the intelligence layer used for personalization across Nike Run Club (NRC), Nike Training Club (NTC), and sport-science research surfaces. The role reports to the Director of Engineering and works closely with engineering, product, design, sport-science, data-science, app, privacy, information-security, and platform teams.

The manager is accountable for building and growing the engineering squad, delivering the platform roadmap, and maintaining the platform’s technical and operational health. This includes service architecture, data quality, test coverage, latency, availability, cost, on-call load, and consumer service-level agreements. The manager also sets the team’s AI-Native engineering practices, using and evaluating AI tools and approaches such as agents, MCP integrations, workflow orchestration, skills, hooks, spec-driven development, and evaluation harnesses.

The role combines people leadership and technical direction. It includes making build-versus-buy decisions, aligning service contracts and data models across teams, supporting mobile SDK and client-data consistency, and helping move sport-science and data-science models into production with appropriate evaluation, consent, privacy, and rollout safeguards. The manager represents the platform in architecture and executive forums and develops engineers through feedback, design-review coaching, and mentorship.

Requirements

• At least 5 years in technology and software engineering roles, including at least 3 years in people management or team leadership.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or an equivalent combination of education, experience, and training.
• Experience leading engineering teams in a highly matrixed environment and driving outcomes across partner organizations not directly managed.
• Track record leading full-stack squads delivering consumer-scale platforms across backend services, mobile SDK integration, and data pipelines, with responsibility for availability, latency, and cost.
• Hands-on technical grounding in modern backend stacks such as Go, Kotlin/Java, or Python; ConnectRPC, gRPC, or REST; event-driven pipelines using Kafka, Kinesis, SNS, or SQS; and cloud-native deployment on AWS or an equivalent platform.
• Working familiarity with at least one mobile platform, iOS/Swift or Android/Kotlin, sufficient to lead technical reviews across backend and client boundaries.
• Experience partnering with Data Science, ML, or Sport Science teams to move models into production, including data contracts, feature pipelines, evaluation, and safe rollout.
• Working familiarity with activity and health data such as GPS traces, sensor time series, HR/HRV, workout aggregates, and training load, and with related consent, privacy, and compliance expectations.
• Strong track record hiring, developing, and performance-managing engineers across levels, including handling difficult feedback conversations and succession planning.
• Ability to lead technical design reviews, align teams on service contracts and data models, and write proposals that Director- and VP-level stakeholders can make decisions against.
• Strong written and verbal communication across engineering, science, product, and executive audiences.
• Demonstrated fluency in AI-Native engineering, supported by specific recent examples of state-of-the-art AI tools and practices accelerating delivery on teams led.
• Understanding of agents, stateful multi-turn conversations, MCP integrations, deterministic workflow orchestration, composable skills, deterministic hooks, spec-driven development, and evaluation harnesses, with sound judgment about their practical effectiveness.

Responsibilities

• Build and operate the Athlete Data Platform team; hire, onboard, grow, and performance-manage a full-stack squad of senior and mid-level engineers in partnership with a Lead or Principal individual contributor.
• Set the team’s AI-Native engineering practices, including agents, workflow orchestration, MCP integrations, skills, hooks, spec-driven development, and evaluation harnesses; measure their impact on delivery and replace practices that are not effective.
• Partner with Principal Engineers, Product, Sport Science, and Data Science to establish the quarterly roadmap and turn platform strategy into committed deliverables, with written specifications reviewed before implementation.
• Own the platform’s technical and operational health, including service architecture, data-model quality, test coverage, latency, availability, cost, on-call load, and consumer SLAs.
• Make and defend build-versus-buy decisions for athlete-data capabilities.
• Partner with NRC and NTC iOS and Android teams on SDK contracts, client caching, and offline/online reconciliation to maintain consistent athlete records across apps and devices.
• Work with Sport Science and Data Science to productionize models based on Nike Sport Research Lab research, including data contracts, feature pipelines, evaluation, consent-aware inference, and safe progressive rollout.
• Partner with Security, Privacy, and Data Governance to protect athlete location, health, and biometric data and maintain consent and compliance end-to-end.
• Represent Athlete Data Platform in cross-MAC architecture reviews, platform-readiness sequencing, and executive forums; communicate across engineering, science, and business audiences.
• Develop the team’s technical standards through structured feedback, design-review coaching, and mentorship across levels.

Benefits

• Accommodations are available during the interview process, including screen readers, sign language interpreters, accessible and single-location in-person interviews, closed captioning, and other reasonable modifications as needed.

What This Job Offers

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