Principal Data & AI Platform Engineer

Lululemon Athletica Inc.; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 206,000 - 270,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation

Health benefits

Paid time off

Equity offerings

Job summary

lululemon Athletica Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Data and AI Platforms to own the design and delivery of the enterprise data platform and AI services powering analytics and insights across the retail ecosystem.

You will lead cross-functional teams, set standards for data governance, scale data pipelines, and mentor senior engineers while collaborating with VP-level stakeholders on strategy and roadmaps. This role may require beyond-hours support.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS/IS/IT or equivalent (Master’s preferred).
• 11–15 years of progressive software engineering with large-scale system design.
• Expert-level coding across multiple languages with production-grade results.
• Experience building and governing data APIs and platform services (gRPC/REST, SDKs, CLIs).
• Experience designing both batch and streaming architectures for analytics.
• Deep understanding of big data and distributed systems challenges.
• Experience with Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform; autoscaled clusters.
• Ownership of enterprise data lake architecture end-to-end.
• Ability to influence architecture decisions and mentor senior engineers.
• Strong communication with executives and stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define vision and approach for enterprise data initiatives and deliver designs.
• Collaborate with architects on data platform architecture and system design.
• Ensure reliability, cost efficiency and platform adoption.
• Design foundational components for ingestion, transformation, orchestration, compute and consumption.
• Build ML/AI data and feature infrastructure for products and use cases.
• Lead cross-team architecture reviews and mentor senior engineers.
• Provide executive-level technical advisory on build vs. buy decisions.
• Drive engineering practices and workflows company-wide.
• Improve velocity through tooling and process improvements.

Skills

Software engineering

Distributed systems

Cross-functional leadership

Data platforms

Kubernetes

gRPC/REST APIs

Education

Bachelor's degree

Master's preferred

Tools

Kubernetes

Helm

Terraform

CI/CD

Job description

lululemon Athletica Inc. is seeking a Principal Software Engineer, Data and AI Platforms to own the design and delivery of the enterprise data platform and AI services powering analytics and insights across the retail ecosystem.

You will lead cross-functional teams, set standards for data governance, scale data pipelines, and mentor senior engineers while collaborating with VP-level stakeholders on strategy and roadmaps. This role may require beyond-hours support.