Lead Engineer – AI-Driven Integrated Planning Platform

Starbucks; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 190,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

Life insurance

401(k) with company match

Bean Stock equity program

Tuition assistance

Paid time off and holidays

Disability benefits

Backup care

Job summary

Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle is seeking a Lead Engineer for the Integrated Planning System to connect demand signals to supply decisions across the enterprise. You will provide technical leadership for scalable, distributed systems and collaborate with product, program, and data teams to deliver production-ready planning solutions.

You will own end-to-end delivery (data→services→UI), drive architecture around streaming, APIs, data models, and AI-enabled workflows, mentor the team, and

Qualifications

• 7+ years building and operating large-scale distributed systems.
• Experience with Kafka and stream processing (Flink/Spark/Kafka Streams).
• Data engineering: reliable pipelines, stateful processing, schema evolution.
• Backend services/API development (TS/Node, Java/Kotlin, Go).
• NoSQL/SQL datastores (Postgres, Cassandra) with caching/analytics stores.
• Cloud experience in Azure/AWS/GCP.
• AI integration with ML/LLM capabilities; model serving and guardrails.
• Observability, monitoring, alerting; meet SLOs.
• Security: secure-by-default development and least-privilege access.
• Leadership: mentoring and cross-team technical leadership.

Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end delivery of product capabilities (data → services → UI), from concept to production rollout.
• Lead architecture and technical decisions across streaming/ big data processing, APIs, data modeling, and user-facing experiences.
• Establish an AI-enabled development workflow with prompts/templates and guardrails.
• Design and ship AI-assisted decision support with real-time inference and explainability.
• Own and evolve API contracts with consistent semantics and backward-compatible changes.
• Drive data quality and identity governance for consistent outputs over time.
• Own performance and reliability with latency/throughput targets and SLOs.
• Mentor and level up the team via code reviews and design reviews.
• Execute cross-functionally with partner teams and clear tradeoffs communication.
• Deliver measurable outcomes to improve service levels and reduce costs.

Skills

Distributed systems

Kafka

Backend APIs

Cloud (Azure/AWS/GCP)

AI integration

Observability

Leadership

Tools

Kafka Streams

Flink

Spark

Databricks

Postgres

Cassandra

TypeScript/Node

Java/Kotlin

Go

Azure/AWS/GCP

Job description

Starbucks Coffee Company in Seattle is seeking a Lead Engineer for the Integrated Planning System to connect demand signals to supply decisions across the enterprise. You will provide technical leadership for scalable, distributed systems and collaborate with product, program, and data teams to deliver production-ready planning solutions.

You will own end-to-end delivery (data→services→UI), drive architecture around streaming, APIs, data models, and AI-enabled workflows, mentor the team, and