release engineer lead

Starbucks Coffee Company•Seattle, WA

8d•Onsite

About The Position

From the beginning, Starbucks set out to be a different kind of company. One that not only celebrated coffee and the rich tradition, but that also brought a feeling of connection. We are known for developing extraordinary leaders who share this passion and are guided by their service to others. As a lead engineer, you'll contribute to the success of the Starbucks Coffeehouse Release Engineering team by ensuring reliability and scalability for our CI/CD solutions. You will ensure design, build, test and deploy capabilities across a distributed retail ecosystem (store devices, in-store services, back-of-house systems, point of sale, and cloud) with a customer-first approach. You'll continue driving the strategy and architecture approach for releases, champion security by design, and help deliver a user-centric control plane/UI dashboard that gives business and operations real-time visibility. You'll be a key partner to Development, Security, Cloud, QA and Edge engineering—aligning stakeholders, influencing outcomes with release engineering best-practices, and crafting mutually agreed solutions that accelerate delivery safely. The ideal candidate brings expertise in CI/CD automation, deployments and release governance. This role requires an equal balance of strategic leadership and tactical execution. As an Engineer Lead, you will Strategic Define and continuously improve the release strategy and (branching, build versioning, security scans, approval gates, deployment, rollbacks, SLAs) and release engineering governance (coding, testing, documentation) for distributed retail services (edge and cloud). Align with business objectives and develop OKRs for clarity and visibility. Execute and deliver by contributing to the Release Engineering roadmap, prioritization of the team's work, refining and continuously improving any processes based on customer or team feedback and retrospectives. Partner with cross-functional engineering, security, cloud infrastructure and architecture teams to influence and prioritize high-value initiatives. Define reliable deployment patterns and policies that meet business requirements at scale securely (POCs, Canary, blue/green). Represent release engineering in initiative and planning discussions providing insights on risk, scalability and customer impact. Manage the team by providing feedback, mentoring, coaching and demonstrate leadership behavior based on Starbucks core values. Tactical Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines, versioning automation, and artifact signing processes. Develop and enhance control plane dashboards for release orchestration and operational visibility. Troubleshoot deployment issues across store devices, edge systems, and cloud services. Create and enforce runbooks, playbooks, and rollback strategies for safe, repeatable deployments. Mentor engineers, conduct design reviews, and ensure adherence to coding and security standards. Perform hands-on configuration management, infrastructure-as-code, and progressive delivery (canary, blue/green, ring deployments).

Requirements

8-10 years of professional industry experience with software development
2 years of leading teams of four or more software developers
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field
Demonstrated thought leadership who can align teams and stakeholders.
Natural ability to lean in, be curious and drive for enablement with a team of 5-7 people.
Systems thinking mindset who understands the customer journey, platform dependencies and operational requirements for a reliable end to end release ecosystem.
Proven experience deploying distributed services/software across retail (stores, edge devices, POS) and cloud backends.
Expertise in CI/CD (e.g. ADO, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) and config management (Chef, Ansible).
Strong security engineering background (vuln management, secrets management, SBOMs).
Strong built-in SRE approach to ensure systems are reliability, scalable and efficient. (Observability, Incident Management, Automation, IaC, etc.)
Cloud experience (Azure, AWS), container orchestration (Kubernetes, edge K3s).
Hands-on operational support (On-call rotation, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Jira).
Ability to influence and partner across engineering, product, and operations; skilled in executive-ready communication.
Experience defining and executing roadmaps in complex, multi-stakeholder environments.
Familiarity with networking, edge constraints, and offline/poor-connectivity scenarios common to retail.
Solid understanding of UX/UI principles for operational dashboards; ability to collaborate with design and front-end teams.
Experience with control plane development for release orchestration; event-driven pipelines and GitOps models (ArgoCD/Flux).

Responsibilities

Define and continuously improve the release strategy and (branching, build versioning, security scans, approval gates, deployment, rollbacks, SLAs) and release engineering governance (coding, testing, documentation) for distributed retail services (edge and cloud).
Align with business objectives and develop OKRs for clarity and visibility.
Execute and deliver by contributing to the Release Engineering roadmap, prioritization of the team's work, refining and continuously improving any processes based on customer or team feedback and retrospectives.
Partner with cross-functional engineering, security, cloud infrastructure and architecture teams to influence and prioritize high-value initiatives.
Define reliable deployment patterns and policies that meet business requirements at scale securely (POCs, Canary, blue/green).
Represent release engineering in initiative and planning discussions providing insights on risk, scalability and customer impact.
Manage the team by providing feedback, mentoring, coaching and demonstrate leadership behavior based on Starbucks core values.
Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines, versioning automation, and artifact signing processes.
Develop and enhance control plane dashboards for release orchestration and operational visibility.
Troubleshoot deployment issues across store devices, edge systems, and cloud services.
Create and enforce runbooks, playbooks, and rollback strategies for safe, repeatable deployments.
Mentor engineers, conduct design reviews, and ensure adherence to coding and security standards.
Perform hands-on configuration management, infrastructure-as-code, and progressive delivery (canary, blue/green, ring deployments).

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
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
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
access to backup care and DACA reimbursement