Principal Engineer - Global Business Application & Platform Services

Costco IT is responsible for the technical future of Costco Wholesale, the third largest retailer in the world with wholesale operations in fourteen countries. Despite our size and explosive international expansion, we continue to provide a family, employee centric atmosphere in which our employees thrive and succeed.

This is an environment unlike anything in the high-tech world and the secret of Costco's success is its culture. The value Costco puts on its employees is well documented in articles from a variety of publishers including Bloomberg and Forbes. Our employees and our members come FIRST. Costco is well known for its generosity and community service and has won many awards for its philanthropy. The company joins with its employees to take an active role in volunteering by sponsoring many opportunities to help others.

Come join the Costco Wholesale IT family. Costco IT is a dynamic, fast-paced environment, working through exciting transformation efforts. We are building the next generation retail environment where you will be surrounded by dedicated and highly professional employees.

The Principal Engineer is the lead architect and hands-on builder of our unified AI Platform as a Service. This role is responsible for transforming raw foundation model capabilities into a scalable, multi-tenant reasoning stack that empowers the entire enterprise to build, deploy, and manage semantic discovery, conversational intelligence, and autonomous agents. This role will balance 40% hands-on systems development with 60% platform strategy, personally coding the core orchestration engines, standardized capability servers, and universal trust guardrails. The mission is to provide a central 'AI Operating System' for the company, ensuring that specialized agents across different business units can communicate via inter-agent protocols, access grounded knowledge layers securely, and execute autonomous tasks within a governed, high-performance agent runtime environment.

The Enterprise/Manufacturing Resource Planning (ERP/MRP) lead engineer and hands-on builder of our Costco ERP/MRP application platform supports our core business functions such as warehouse, buying, supply chain, and manufacturing. This is a pivotal role on the Global Business Application & Platform team building robust and scalable enterprise technology solutions to replace the current Costco legacy core business applications as part of the Business Applications Replatform program. The individual in this role will play a crucial part in the development of the new Costco ERP/MRP solution, leading the development and governance of the ERP/MRP Physical architecture, and the design, development, and implementation of the core/common platforms and feature specific capabilities. This person will be primarily responsible for partnering with Enterprise and solutions architecture, product management, software development, and quality assurance teams to ensure the successful development and delivery of new ERP/MRP solutions according to the overall modernization roadmap. The mission is to provide a core platform for all ERP/MRP platforms to be built on for the future.

If you want to be a part of one of the worldwide BEST companies "to work for", simply apply and let your career be reimagined.

ROLE

• Partners with Leadership, and Enterprise and Solution Architects to transition conceptual and logical architectures to physical implementation architectures, including application, integration, platform, and data architectures
• Develops and articulates the long-term, multi-year technical roadmap for the ERP/MRP Platform, ensuring its capabilities are strategically aligned with the overarching business objectives.
• Develops and implements an industry-leading ERP/MRP platform. This platform will offer standardized blueprints for engineering teams to utilize
• Leads the definition and governance of technology and application development standards to be used across all capability design and development workstreams
• Leads and mentors' teams of engineers; provides technical guidance, shares best practices, and fosters a culture of continuous learning and growth
• Leads the design, development, and deployment of scalable, high-performance enterprise technical solutions across the Costco ERP/MRP landscape
• Adheres to and drives modern software engineering practices through design reviews.
• Develops "best-in-class" engineering by ensuring that the new technology capabilities are well-defined and modularized, secure, reliable, diagnosable, actively monitored, and reusable.
• Improves test coverage for services; organizes and implements integration tests; and resolves problem areas.
• Ensures testability, portability/monitoring, reliability, and maintainability; and understands when code is ready to be shared and delivered.
• Gains a working understanding of Costco's business and collaborates with cross-functional teams, including Product Managers, Architects, and other Engineering teams, to gather requirements, define technical specifications, and drive the implementation of scalable and reliable solutions.
• Collaborates with other teams such as the Infrastructure, Cloud Platform, and Security teams to ensure that applications are conformant to Costco standards and processes
• Collaborates with DevOps teams to ensure the smooth deployment and operation of services and systems in a highly available and scalable production environment.
• Troubleshoots and optimizes automation, reliability, and monitoring for delivered products.
• Stays up-to-date with the latest industry trends and advancements in ERP/MRP business and technology solutions and applies them to drive innovation and excellence in our solutions.
• Ensures the longevity, scalability and quality of our systems through continuous improvement, comprehensive documentation, meticulous profiling, and significant performance enhancements.
• Able to support off-hours work as required, including weekends, holidays, and 24/7 on-call responsibilities on a rotational basis.

REQUIRED

• 12+ years in Software Engineering, with at least 4 years in a Principal or Architect-level role.
• Experience leading technical workstreams, translating business problems into ERP/MRP architectures
• 5+ years specifically architecting ERP/MRP systems, with a proven track record of moving software projects into production at scale.
• Familiarity with microservices-based architecture patterns.
• Extensive experience in designing, developing, and implementing ERP/MRP platforms, preferably in a large retail or ERP/MRP product company.
• Strong proficiency in current technologies and languages.
• Experience with scalable cloud platforms (ex. Google Cloud and/or Azure) and related services such as serverless computing, containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, CloudFormation).
• Proficient in using modern software development tools, version control systems (ex. Git), and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
• Solid understanding of software engineering principles, design patterns, and best practices for building highly scalable and maintainable systems.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills, with the ability to dissect complex technical challenges and propose innovative solutions.
• Strong communication and leadership abilities, with a proven track record of collaborating effectively in cross-functional teams and mentoring Engineers.
• Able to translate complex technical concepts for non-technical audiences.
• 5+ years of experience developing within an agile methodology.
• Strong verbal and written communication skills and able to communicate to both technical and business audiences.
• Ability to work under pressure in crisis with a strong sense of urgency.
• Responsible, conscientious, organized, self-motivated and able to work with limited supervision.
• Detail-oriented and possess strong problem-solving skills and ability to analyze potential future issues.

Recommended

• Experience replatforming legacy IBMi solutions (AS/400/RPG)
• Certified Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect
• Bachelor's or Master's Degree in Computer Science, or a related technical discipline.
• Experience with deploying and configuring Cloud Platform resources.
• Knowledge of: Business ecosystems, SaaS, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), SOA, APIs, open data, microservices, event-driven IT, predictive analytics, Cloud Networking, Data Security, Infrastructure Security, Zero Trust.Security Monitoring, Identity and Access Management.
• Familiarity with enterprise architecture tools, related graphical models, and frameworks
• Experience with Public Cloud services (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform), Cloud Security knowledge.
• Experience with Containers (Kubernetes, Docker, etc.).
• Experience working in ERP and Retail systems software (IBM i and/or SAP), including knowledge of Product Lifecycle Management.
• Experience with distributed Enterprise Architecture.
• Proficient in services integration, messaging, object-oriented programming concepts, multi-tiered distributed component-based technology, legacy infrastructure platforms and technologies, and enterprise service bus.
• Working knowledge of DevOps, agile methodology, and continuous improvement.
• Analytical thinker possessing strong problem solving and decision-making skills.
• Proven experience with creating documentation for communication with varied audiences.
• Deep understanding of business requirements elicitation pursuant to specific programs/projects involved.
• Proficient in Google Workspace applications, including Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Gmail.

Required Documents
Cover Letter
Resume

California applicants, please click here to review the Costco Applicant Privacy Notice.

Pay Range: $160,000 - $230,000

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, health benefits - medical/dental/vision/hearing aid/pharmacy/behavioral health/employee assistance, health care reimbursement account, dependent care assistance plan, short-term disability and long-term disability insurance, AD&D insurance, life insurance, 401(k), stock purchase plan to eligible employees.

Costco is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Costco is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or any other legally protected status. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request to

If hired, you will be required to provide proof of authorization to work in the United States. Applicants and employees for this position will not be sponsored for work authorization, including, but not limited to H1-B visas.