engineer principal- Data Platform and Services, - ST (Seattle, WA)

Starbucks Coffee Company • Seattle, WA

2d • $173,900 - $289,900 • Hybrid

About The Position

Starbucks is seeking a talented Principal Engineer to join their Data Platform and Services team. This role will focus on revolutionizing data capabilities by leading the charge in streamlining and innovating the data platform and services across the enterprise, impacting corporate, supply chain, customer, partner, and in-store experiences. The position involves leading a centralized enterprise data management team to ensure real-time data access and accuracy, championing seamless API integration across digital ecosystems, and paving the way for future data innovation at Starbucks. The ideal candidate thrives in a fast-paced environment, enjoys tackling complex challenges, and is passionate about driving data-driven innovation.

Requirements

• 10-15 years of professional industry experience with software development and platform management
• 5 years of leading teams of six or more software developers
• 3 years of demonstrating technical leadership across multiple platforms
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Nice To Haves

• Demonstrated adoption of AI-assisted software engineering practices, leveraging GenAI, AI coding assistants, and agentic workflows to accelerate software development, code generation, unit testing, code reviews, troubleshooting, documentation, and vulnerability remediation while maintaining strong engineering, security, and quality standards.
• Ability to identify and drive AI-enabled automation opportunities across the software development lifecycle and engineering operations, using AI to improve developer productivity, reduce repetitive work, accelerate problem resolution, and enhance overall engineering effectiveness.
• 9+ years of hands-on software engineering experience with Java, Spring Boot, CQRS, event-driven architectures, Kafka, and Spark, along with strong experience in Kubernetes or comparable container orchestration platforms.
• 7+ years of experience designing and delivering highly scalable, resilient, responsive, and message-driven microservices for large-scale, distributed, mission-critical platforms. Demonstrated expertise in distributed system design, performance optimization, troubleshooting complex production issues, and automating repetitive engineering and operational tasks.
• 5+ years of experience owning and managing systems of varying scale and complexity, including large distributed platforms with end-to-end operational responsibility, production reliability, availability, observability, and continuous improvement.
• Strong database and data architecture knowledge, with experience across relational and NoSQL technologies such as Oracle, MongoDB, Cassandra, and Couchbase, including the associated development, operational, and performance optimization toolsets.
• Deep understanding of enterprise security, RESTful API design, and cloud-native engineering practices, with hands-on experience designing and deploying secure, scalable workloads in cloud environments such as AWS and Azure.
• Exceptional communication and presentation skills, with the ability to clearly articulate architectural concepts, engineering rationale, tradeoffs, and complex technical challenges to both technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Communicates highly complex technical ideas, architectural strategies, and trade-offs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Establishes strong cross-functional, collaborative relationships with business, product, architecture, security, and technology partners to drive alignment and execution.
• Provides technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams, proactively removing technical barriers and resolving complex development and production issues.
• Champions AI adoption across the software development lifecycle, leveraging AI-assisted engineering and agentic capabilities to improve developer productivity, code quality, testing, documentation, troubleshooting, and operational efficiency.
• Identifies and drives opportunities to embed AI and automation into engineering workflows and platform capabilities, reducing manual effort and accelerating reliable delivery.
• Establishes engineering standards and continuously improves build, test, release, and deployment processes through automation.
• Conducts research and technical evaluations of emerging technologies, including AI, data, cloud, observability, and platform engineering capabilities, and provides recommendations based on business and technology needs.
• Ensures application, data, and infrastructure architectures are scalable, resilient, secure, maintainable, and compliant with company standards and engineering practices.
• Implements technologies in accordance with Information Security principles, with particular focus on protecting highly sensitive and regulated data.
• Designs and enables highly available platforms while driving automation across operational processes to improve reliability, recovery, and engineering efficiency.
• Implements deep telemetry, observability, and measurable success metrics to continuously assess platform health, performance, reliability, and customer impact.
• Establishes proactive monitoring and intelligent alerting across platforms to ensure continuous availability and operational continuity of critical systems.
• Leverages AI-driven insights, automation, and observability to enable proactive issue detection, faster root-cause analysis, and continuous platform optimization.
• Drives technical modernization and simplification, reducing technical debt and improving scalability, maintainability, and long-term platform sustainability.
• Ensures solutions and engineering practices comply with company policies and applicable legal, regulatory, privacy, and security requirements, including PCI.

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: Principal