Lead Architect, Data Platform & Services

Starbucks Corp.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 260,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401(k) with employer match

Bean Stock Starbucks equity program

Tuition coverage via Starbucks College

Paid vacation and holidays

Job summary

Starbucks Corp. is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the Data Platform and Services team in Seattle. You will architect, develop, and scale enterprise data platforms that enable real-time access across corporate, supply chain, and customer channels.

You will mentor engineers, drive AI-enabled automation, and establish standards for secure, resilient, and observable systems in a fast-paced environment onsite four days a week.

Qualifications

• 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 showing technical leadership across multiple platforms.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field.

Responsibilities

• Communicates complex technical ideas and architectural strategies to stakeholders.
• Establishes cross-functional relationships to drive alignment and execution.
• Provides technical leadership and mentorship to engineering teams.
• Champions AI adoption across the software development lifecycle.
• Embeds AI and automation into engineering workflows and platform capabilities.
• Establishes engineering standards and improves CI/CD processes through automation.
• Researches emerging technologies and provides recommendations.
• Ensures scalable, secure, and compliant architectures across platforms.
• Implements security-principled cloud-native engineering practices.
• Designs highly available platforms and drives automation for reliability.
• Implements telemetry and observability to measure platform health and customer impact.
• Establishes proactive monitoring and intelligent alerting for operational continuity.
• Drives modernization, reduces technical debt, and improves long-term sustainability.

Skills

Leadership

Distributed systems

API design

Cloud engineering

AI in software

Mentorship

Security & compliance

Kubernetes

Java / Spring Boot

Observability

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science

Tools

Kafka

Spark

Kubernetes

Oracle

MongoDB

Cassandra

Couchbase

AWS

Azure

Job description

Starbucks Corp. is seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the Data Platform and Services team in Seattle. You will architect, develop, and scale enterprise data platforms that enable real-time access across corporate, supply chain, and customer channels.

You will mentor engineers, drive AI-enabled automation, and establish standards for secure, resilient, and observable systems in a fast-paced environment onsite four days a week.