senior engineer, AI (Nashville, TN)

Starbucks Coffee Company • Nashville, TN

5d • $117,000 - $194,800 • Hybrid

About The Position

As a Senior Engineer (AI), you’ll play a critical role in delivering high-quality, reliable, and secure Generative AI technology that enables coffee house partners and leaders to operate effectively, deliver results with quality and be more customer focused. This advanced role focuses on owning complex engineering capabilities end-to-end—partnering across business and technology teams to bring in AI capabilities where it matters most in a cost effective, performant way with reliability, scalability, and operational excellence at the core.

Requirements

• 4–10 years of professional experience in software engineering
• Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks, vector databases, RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) pipelines, and LLM orchestration
• Experience deploying scalable AI services on cloud platforms.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field
• Preferred programming languages: one or more of Python, Java, Go, C/C++, Ruby, or Perl (especially for automation, tooling, and systems work)

Responsibilities

• Design end-to-end AI and machine learning workflows, integrating large language models (LLMs) and multi-agent frameworks into production applications.
• Enable strong engineering delivery by supporting development teams, resolving complex technical and developer issues, and engineering robust build and release processes.
• Ensure security and compliance by design through stable, secure application and infrastructure solutions, maintaining hardened configurations and baselines, and upholding company policies and regulatory requirements.
• Influence technical direction and standards by researching and recommending tools, platforms, and best practices, and partnering across teams and vendors to improve outcomes.

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: Senior