Principal Engineer

lululemon; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

lululemon seeks a Principal Engineer to shape the technical vision across our global retail platforms, enabling secure, scalable experiences for guests and educators. You will lead as a senior technical authority, collaborate with architects, product leaders, and engineering teams, and advance AI-enabled development, reliability, and platform health across POS, mobile, payments, and store data systems.

Hands-on coding when needed, while driving architectural decisions, trade-offs, and cross-team

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in CS or equivalent required.
• Proven track record in large-scale system design and cross-functional leadership.
• Expert-level coding across multiple languages/frameworks.
• Experience with AI-assisted development and automation to improve delivery.
• Ability to balance delivery, scalability, reliability, and cost.
• Strong communication skills and ability to influence senior stakeholders.
• Experience with retail or enterprise distributed systems is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Define the technical vision and architecture for global retail systems initiatives.
• Serve as senior technical authority across POS, mobile, payments, and inventory platforms.
• Write production-grade code when hands-on work is essential.
• Collaborate with architects, product leaders, and engineers to translate strategy into durable tech direction.
• Lead cross-team integrations and AI-enabled transformation efforts.
• Raise engineering standards, reliability, observability, and deployment readiness.
• Identify and mitigate systemic risks and technical debt affecting store operations.

Skills

Cross-functional leadership

Architectural design

Production-grade coding

AI-enabled development

System reliability

Technical influence

Education

Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Master’s degree preferred

Tools

AI-assisted development tooling

Job description

lululemon is an innovative performance apparel company for yoga, running, training, and other athletic pursuits. Setting the bar in technical fabrics and functional design, we create transformational products and experiences that support people in moving, growing, connecting, and being well. We owe our success to our innovative product, emphasis on stores, commitment to our people, and the incredible connections we make in every community we’re in. As a company, we focus on creating positive change to build a healthier, thriving future, including creating an equitable, inclusive, and growth-focused environment for our people.

about this team

This team builds and operates the technology that powers world-class guest and educator experiences across lululemon’s global retail ecosystem. Its work spans core retail, cross-channel digital and guest experience capabilities, and enterprise platforms, with a focus on shaping the future of retail through reliable, scalable, intelligent technology and AI-enabled ways of building software.

The team owns and enables critical retail systems and platforms, including retail transacting platforms, educator experience and productivity tools, enterprise payments, store data and intelligence, retail expansion and reliability, wholesale/B2B technology, and contact center technology.

Our systems support some of lululemon’s most important guest and educator journeys. The team partners closely with retail operations, product, architecture, infrastructure, security, enterprise platforms, international markets, and business leaders to deliver secure, resilient, scalable technology with measurable business impact, while pushing the boundaries of how AI can transform retail technology.

core responsibilities

As a Principal Engineer, you will define the technical vision and implementation approach for major technology initiatives across lululemon’s global retail systems landscape. You will serve as the senior technical authority across complex, interconnected systems that support store transactions, educator tools, inventory visibility, payments, store intelligence, and retail operations, while helping transform how the organisation builds software through AI-enabled and agentic development practices.

You will collaborate closely with architects, product leaders, engineering teams, business stakeholders, and senior technology leaders to translate business strategy into durable technical direction, scalable system design, executable engineering roadmaps, and transformation plans. You will provide deep implementation expertise on architecture decisions, feasibility, operational implications, build-versus-buy decisions, technology selection, and implementation risk.

This role combines hands-on engineering judgement with broad technical leadership. You will write high-quality production code when the most complex challenges require direct technical depth, while also raising engineering standards, improving system reliability, increasing delivery throughput, and advancing the use of AI and agentic development to strengthen the long-term health of retail platforms and engineering practices.

You will influence across multiple teams without relying on formal authority, building consensus around technical direction, surfacing trade-offs, and acting as a thought partner to technology leadership on how AI, engineering practices, and platform strategy can drive meaningful retail business outcomes.

select responsibilities include:

• Define the technical vision, system design, and implementation approach for major retail systems initiatives that support global store, guest, educator, and omni-channel experiences.
• Serve as a senior technical authority across complex retail platforms, including POS, mobile commerce, endless aisle, enterprise payments, RFID, inventory systems, retail data, and AI-enabled retail capabilities.
• Write high-quality production code to solve critical technical challenges when hands-on expertise is required, including AI-enabled tooling, automation, and agentic development patterns where they create meaningful leverage.
• Partner with architects, product leaders, engineering teams, business stakeholders, and technology leadership to translate strategy into scalable architecture, executable roadmaps, AI-informed transformation plans, and operationally sound delivery.
• Lead complex cross-team integrations across retail platforms, shared services, enterprise systems, market-specific capabilities, and emerging AI-powered experiences.
• Raise engineering standards across multiple teams, including code quality, reliability, observability, deployment readiness, technical debt management, operational excellence, and responsible adoption of AI-assisted and agentic software development.
• Identify and mitigate systemic technical risks, reliability gaps, integration complexity, platform constraints, AI governance needs, and technical debt that could impact store operations, guest experience, or enterprise scale.

qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Information Technology, or equivalent experience; Master’s degree preferred.
• 11+ years of progressive software engineering experience, with demonstrated expertise in large-scale system design, technical architecture, and cross-functional leadership across multiple technology domains.
• Expert-level coding ability, with a track record of writing production-quality code to solve critical and complex technical challenges across multiple languages, frameworks, or platforms.
• Deep experience reasoning across complex, interconnected systems and making durable technical trade-offs that balance delivery needs, scalability, reliability, maintainability, cost, and organisational impact.
• Experience using AI-assisted development, agentic software engineering, automation, or emerging developer productivity tools to improve how teams design, build, test, deploy, and operate software.
• Recognised technical depth in one or more engineering domains, with enough strategic breadth to assess system-wide implications across adjacent platforms, AI capabilities, and business domains.
• Proven ability to influence product strategy, investment decisions, technical direction, AI adoption, and business outcomes through credibility, clarity, sound judgement, and technical insight.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts and act as a thought partner to engineers, product leaders, business stakeholders, technology leadership, and executive audiences.
• Experience improving platform health, code quality, engineering practices, observability, resiliency, deployment automation, incident reduction, and operational excellence across business-critical systems.
• Experience with retail systems, commerce platforms, store technology, mobile applications, payments, inventory systems, retail operations, or similarly complex distributed enterprise environments is preferred.

must haves

• Acknowledge the presence of choice in every moment and take personal responsibility for your life.
• Possess an entrepreneurial spirit and continuously innovate to achieve great results.
• Communicate with honesty and kindness and create the space for others to do the same.
• Lead with courage, knowing the possibility of greatness is bigger than the fear of failure.
• Foster connection by putting people first and building trusting relationships.
• Integrate fun and joy as a way of being and working, also known as not taking yourself too seriously.