principal production engineer- Retail Hardware

Now Brewing - Principal Production Engineer, Retail Hardware

The IOT & Retail Hardware organization spends most of its time out at the edges of the map. Naturally, this means lots of exploration-prototyping and building, and testing for internal efforts or in collaboration with R&D teams. But we place equal focus on operationalizing products that successfully emerge from testing bound for wider rollout, to ensure they can be deployed at speed and run at scale. Our production engineers have been instrumental in our success, driving the reliability, security, scalability, and efficiency of our applications, infrastructure, and devices in cloud and retail environments.

The role of production engineers is only growing in importance. As Starbucks accelerates the introduction of new digital displays and other connected devices to the retail environment, we need powerful new capabilities to deploy and manage them. The standard model of wiring up some observability tool and then letting the helpdesk respond to alerts barely scales to the store of today, and when one new thing is deployed to just our North American stores results in a fleet of 10,000 new things. It will not survive the rogue waves to come.

This new role is part of a larger investment in production engineering to meet the growing need for highly automated, hands-off operation of distributed fleets of equipment. The principal engineer will define and deliver engineering efforts, as well as help grow and lead production engineering within the team.

The right candidate will have a broad and deep background in systems design and engineering, with expertise up and down the tech stack and through all phases of the design / build/deploy/run lifecycle. Success will also require agility: iterating from ideas to prototypes to solid implementations, testing and correcting as new use cases emerge, continually evolving best practices, and re-evaluating tradeoffs as needs shift.

Summary of Key Responsibilities

Responsibilities and essential job functions include but are not limited to the following:

• Technical Leadership and mentoring
  
  • Serve as a hands-on, cross-functional lead for retail deployments of a variety of devices, contributing and collaborating across domains including wireless and wired network connectivity, third-party platform integration, install planning and validation, automation and observability at hardware / OS/app layers, security, and day 2 fleet management & operational support
  • Lead the production engineering team through the solution design process, shaping and guiding systems approach and technical design, and driving continual improvement for existing platforms in collaboration with stakeholders.
  • Coach team members, and work with the manager to assess and improve team capabilities through development opportunities.
  • Collaborate with other principal-level engineers across retail technology to share best practices and tooling and drive toward greater standardization and interoperability.
• Engineering Stewardship
  
  • Establish, maintain, and improve engineering standards and best practices in configuration management & automation, monitoring & alerting, software build & deployment, performance optimization, reliability, and scalability.
  • Solidify practices for evaluation and testing within the team so that test results are deterministic and repeatable and that other teams know what to provide and expect.
  • Promote production engineering principles and culture across the team's production engineers and product developers, its embedded technical product managers, and out into the wider retail technology organization.

Basic Qualifications
We'd love to hear from people with:

• 10-15 years of professional industry experience in systems design & engineering, technical operations, and software development
• 5 years of leading teams of five or more engineers
• 3 years of demonstrating technical leadership across multiple platforms
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Preferred Qualifications
We'd especially love to hear from people with:

• 5+ years delivering technology with the expectation of 24x7 uptime and high scalability, working in a tiered support environment
• 5+ years managing hardware - especially digital displays - at scale in a retail or commercial environment, with a focus on observability and automation
• 4+ years experience with infrastructure, including networking, Linux OS fundamentals, imaging and software config mgmt, authentication, remote management, performance monitoring & tuning, shell scripting
• 4+ years experience in modern web architectures, with expertise in internet-facing protocols and technologies
• 4+ years experience in Python
• 3+ years experience in Agile methodologies and delivery

...and who can:

• Navigate easily across a broad spectrum of technologies and infrastructure while keeping a strong engineering mindset.
• Decompose complex problems into a clear set of needs and deliverables
• Create and implement designs that meet scalability, performance and optimization, supportability, and maintainability concerns
• Quickly pick up new technologies and trends as they become relevant for the business and our platforms.
• Understand data: how to capture, learn from, and leverage it in decision-making
• Translate ideas into POC efforts, drive through pilot deployments to gain measurable results, and grow into enterprise delivery at scale
• Draw together different teams and drive collaborative projects, building shared vision and leading through influence
• Negotiate capably with internal and external customers and suppliers
• Communicate effectively with those at any level of the org chart or degree of technical knowledge.
• Mentor and guide others through innovation and delivery based on these projects

From free coffee to competitive pay, Starbucks is proud to offer a comprehensive compensation and benefits package to our eligible part-time and full-time partners. Benefits include 100% tuition coverage through our Starbucks College Achievement Plan, health coverage with a variety of plans to choose from, and stock & savings programs like our equity reward program, Bean Stock. What's more, Starbucks offers flexible scheduling and opportunities for paid time off. Visit starbucksbenefits.com for details.

If you live in the greater Seattle area, we offer a flexible workplace that allows for Hybrid work. Partners can work remotely up to two days per week.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.

We are committed to creating a diverse and welcoming workplace that includes partners with diverse backgrounds and experiences. We believe that enables us to better meet our mission and values while serving customers throughout our global communities. People of color, women, LGBTQIA+, veterans and persons with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

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