senior engineer, Planning Demand (Seattle, WA)

Starbucks Corp.; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision insurance

401(k) with employer match

Starbucks College Achievement Plan (tu

Tuition coverage for degree

Paid vacation & holidays

Life insurance & disability benefits

Job summary

Starbucks Corp. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer in Seattle to help build and evolve the Integrated planning system that links demand signals to supply decisions across the enterprise.

You will design scalable, distributed solutions across data, services, and user experiences, while upholding reliability, security, and maintainability standards. You will work closely with product, program, data, and engineering partners to translate complex business needs into production-ready capabilities,

Qualifications

• Seven or more years in distributed systems design, development, and operation with high scalability requirements.
• Strong experience with event-driven architectures and stream processing technologies (Kafka, Spark).
• Experience building reliable data pipelines and distributed processing at scale.
• Production APIs and services in TypeScript/Node.js, Java/Kotlin, Go or equivalent.
• Proficiency with relational and NoSQL stores; performance tuning and data modeling.
• Hands-on cloud engineering across Azure, AWS or GCP; security and cost considerations.
• Experience integrating ML/LLM capabilities into production apps and monitoring.
• Proven ability to mentor engineers and influence technical decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own complex capabilities end to end across data pipelines, backend services, APIs, and user experiences.
• Design scalable distributed solutions with modern patterns and event-driven architectures.
• Contribute to architectural direction, balancing scalability, performance, reliability, and cost.
• Apply AI-assisted engineering practices across the lifecycle and establish guardrails.
• Build AI-assisted decision-support capabilities with explainability and monitoring.
• Design stable APIs with versioning, semantics, and backward compatibility.
• Strengthen data quality and governance across planning workflows.
• Engineering for performance, throughput, latency, and resilience with observability.
• Deliver production-ready software with testing, security controls, and operations readiness.
• Raise engineering quality through code/design reviews and mentoring.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to translate business needs into reliable production solutions.

Skills

Distributed systems

Streaming & event-driven

Data engineering

Backend engineering

SQL/NoSQL databases

Cloud platforms

AI/ML integration

Observability & reliability

Security best-practices

Technical leadership

Tools

Apache Kafka

Apache Spark

Databricks

Kafka Streams

Job description

Now Brewing – Software Engineer! #tobeapartner

From the beginning, Starbucks set out to be a different kind of company. One that not only celebrated coffee and the rich tradition, but that also brought a feeling of connection. We are known for developing extraordinary leaders who share this passion and are guided by their service to others.

As a Senior Engineer, you will help build and evolve Starbucks’ Integrated planning system that connects demand signals to supply decisions across the enterprise. You will design and deliver scalable, distributed solutions across data, services, and user experiences, while contributing to architecture and engineering standards that enable reliable planning and supply chain operations. You will work closely with product, program, data, and engineering partners to translate complex business needs into production-ready capabilities. You will also help advance the team’s use of AI-assisted engineering and AI-enabled decision support, while maintaining strong standards for reliability, security, data quality, and maintainability.

As a Senior Engineer, you will…

• Own complex product capabilities end to end, spanning data pipelines, backend services, APIs, and user-facing experiences, from technical design through production rollout and ongoing support.
• Design scalable, distributed solutions using event-driven and streaming architectures, big-data processing, APIs, data models, and modern application patterns.
• Contribute to architecture and technical direction, evaluating design alternatives and making sound engineering trade-offs across scalability, performance, reliability, maintainability, and cost.
• Apply AI-assisted engineering practices throughout requirements analysis, design, implementation, testing, code review, documentation, and incident/RCA activities, while helping develop reusable patterns and appropriate guardrails.
• Build AI-assisted decision-support capabilities, including inference, summarization, explainability, alerting, and human-in-the-loop experiences, with measurable business and operational outcomes.
• Design and evolve APIs and service contracts with consistent semantics, boundary validation, predictable naming, backward compatibility, and appropriate versioning and deprecation practices.
• Strengthen data quality and identity consistency by implementing reliable master-data, validation, schema, and data-governance patterns across planning workflows.
• Engineer for performance and reliability, defining and meeting latency, throughput, availability, and resilience requirements; designing for backpressure, retries, idempotency, observability, and failure recovery.
• Build production-ready software with effective monitoring, tracing, alerting, automated testing, security controls, and operational readiness.
• Raise engineering quality across the team through thoughtful code reviews, design reviews, pairing, technical documentation, knowledge sharing, and mentoring.
• Partner effectively across functions, translating business and product requirements into actionable technical designs and communicating dependencies, risks, progress, and engineering trade-offs clearly.
• Drive measurable outcomes by improving service levels, reducing operational complexity and cost, accelerating decision cycles, and enabling better planning decisions through automation and actionable insights.

Required Experience

• Distributed systems: 7+ years of software engineering experience, including designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed or multi-service systems with demanding scalability, performance, availability, and fault-tolerance requirements.
• Streaming and event-driven architecture: Strong experience with Apache Kafka or equivalent event-streaming technologies, along with stream-processing technologies such as Apache Flink, Apache Spark Structured Streaming, or Kafka Streams.
• Data engineering: Experience building reliable data pipelines and distributed processing solutions, including stateful processing, schema evolution, backfills, data validation, and idempotent processing. Experience with technologies such as Apache Spark and Databricks is strongly preferred.
• Backend engineering: Strong experience developing production APIs and services using TypeScript/Node.js, Java/Kotlin, Go, or comparable languages and frameworks, including caching, concurrency, resiliency, and performance optimization.
• Data stores: Strong experience with relational and NoSQL technologies such as PostgreSQL and Cassandra, or comparable platforms. Solid understanding of indexing, partitioning, query optimization, distributed caching, document stores, and/or analytical data stores.
• Cloud engineering: Hands-on experience with Azure, AWS, or GCP, including cloud-native services, IAM, networking fundamentals, resiliency patterns, and cost/performance trade-offs.
• AI/ML integration: Experience integrating ML or LLM capabilities into production applications, including model integration or serving, prompt patterns, evaluation, safety and guardrails, monitoring, and feedback loops.
• Observability and reliability: Experience implementing production monitoring, distributed tracing, logging, alerting, incident response, root-cause analysis, and service-level objectives (SLOs).
• Security: Strong understanding of secure-by-default software development, sensitive-data handling, least-privilege access, secrets management, and auditability.
• Engineering excellence: Demonstrated ability to produce maintainable, testable production software and improve engineering practices through automated testing, CI/CD, code reviews, technical documentation, and operational readiness.
• Technical influence and mentoring: Demonstrated ability to influence technical decisions, contribute to design reviews, mentor engineers, and successfully deliver complex solutions across ambiguous problem spaces.
• Cross-functional delivery: Proven ability to collaborate with product, program, data, platform, and engineering teams to turn complex requirements into reliable production solutions.

As a Starbucks partner, you (and your family) will have access to medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, and other voluntary insurance benefits. Partners have access to short-term and long-term disability, paid parental leave, family expansion reimbursement, paid vacation from date of hire*, sick time (accrued at 1 hour for every 25 hours worked), eight paid holidays, and two personal days per year. Starbucks also offers eligible partners participation in a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match, a discounted company stock program (S.I.P.), Starbucks equity program (Bean Stock), incentivized emergency savings, and financial well-being tools. Additionally, Starbucks offers 100% upfront tuition coverage for a first-time bachelor’s degree through Arizona State University’s online program via the Starbucks College Achievement Plan, student loan management resources, and access to other educational opportunities. You will also have access to backup care and DACA reimbursement. Starbucks will comply with any applicable state and local laws regarding employee leave benefits, including, but not limited to providing time off pursuant to the Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act, and in accordance with its plans and policies. This list is subject to change depending on collective bargaining in locations where partners have a certified bargaining representative. For additional information regarding partner perks and more detailed information about benefits, go to starbucksbenefits.com.

• If you are working in CA, CO, IL, LA, ME, MA, NE, ND or RI, you will accrue vacation up to a maximum of 120 hours (190 in CA) for roles below director and 200 hours (316 in CA) for roles at director or above. For roles in other states, you will be granted vacation time starting at 120 hours annually for roles below director and 200 hours annually for roles director and above.

The actual base pay offered to the successful candidate will be based on multiple factors, including but not limited to job-related knowledge/skills, experience, geographical location, and internal equity. At Starbucks, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at the high end of the range for their role, and compensation decisions are dependent upon the facts and circumstances of each position and candidate.

Starbucks Coffee Company is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with all federal, state and local ordinances.

Starbucks Coffee Company is committed to offering reasonable accommodations to job applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please contact us at applicantaccommodation or 1(888) 611-2258.