engineer lead, (Java Springboot) - ST Seattle WA

Starbucks; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 150,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Starbucks is seeking an experienced Platform Engineering leader responsible for guiding a team through design, delivery, and operations of scalable solutions.

You will ensure secure, durable, and scalable platform architectures while aligning with technology roadmaps and business goals.

Qualifications

• Minimum 6+ years of professional software development and operations experience.
• 3-5 years leading or managing large or small technical teams and projects.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field required.

Responsibilities

• Lead a Platform Engineering team through design, delivery, and operations of solutions.
• Drive platform security automation to comply with security requirements.
• Partner with cross-functional teams to promote platform evolution and stability.

Skills

Leadership

Platform security

Cloud computing

Automation

Security architecture

Team management

AI-enabled tooling

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

GitHub Copilot

Cursor

Cloud platforms (Azure/AWS/GCP)

Job description

Job Summary and Mission

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.

Summary of Key Responsibilities

Responsibilities and essential job functions include but are not limited to the following:

Leadership - Setting goals for the work group, developing organizational capability, and modeling how we work together:

• 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.

Platform Stewardship - Championing platform efforts to promote platform evolvement and stability to support business needs:

• 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.

Production Support for application and platform components:

• 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.

Basic Qualifications

• 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

Preferred Qualifications

Technical Proficiency

• 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 knowl