engineer principal, platform engineering

Key Skills

Aartificial intelligence, AIOps, Ansible, AWS, Azure, Big Data Technology, Cyber Security, DevOps, Git, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), HTTP acceleration, Infrastructure as code, Jenkins, Linux Operating system, Machine learning techniques, NoSQL, PaaS, RDBMS, User support and Troubleshooting

Job Description

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

Leadership – Setting goals for the work group, developing organizational capability, and modeling how we work together: 

• Leads an engineering team with Automation focus to comply with Starbucks Cloud governance and Global Cyber Security requirements.
• Provide Architecture Design Pattern 
• Provide Automation Engineering Services for common platform components
• Provide consultative services for technical issues within the application teams.
• Interface with Starbucks Cloud and Global Cyber Security teams representing our application platforms.
• Leads the technical team through the solution design process. Leverages and develops talent on the team through all phases of project efforts, including requirements gathering, assessment and backlog refinement. Shapes and guides systems approach, manages project initiation, technical design and development efforts. 
• Ensures platform has modularized design patterns and coding standards in place. Directs team toward secure, durable, scalable, flexible, and accessible solutions that proactively mitigate against production support issues. 
• Identifies and communicates key responsibilities and practices to ensure the immediate team of direct reports promotes a successful attitude, confidence in leadership, and teamwork to achieve business results. 
• Accountable for delivery of development and operational efforts of the team by ensuring efforts are structured and prioritized appropriately.

Platform Stewardship – Championing platform automation efforts to promote platform evolvement and stability to support business needs. 

• Partners with cross functional teams, such as Infrastructure, Security, Architecture, QA and key Development teams, to streamline processes and strengthen and elevate the platform from a technology perspective. Successfully sees designs and solutions through enterprise processes and governance to ensure compliant, secure, and supportable solutions.
• Streamline the software development lifecycle by identifying pain points and productivity barriers and determining ways to resolve them.
• Collaborate closely with development teams to understand their current build and release processes and make recommendations for improvement. 
• Provide guidance to development teams to improve performance and operability of the solutions they develop.
• Build and maintain the CI/CD pipelines to improve developer productivity, agility, and code quality.
• Develop and continuously improve automation solutions to enable teams to build and deploy code efficiently and consistently.
• Build automated testing to reduce manual effort and improve product quality. 
• Ensure that systems meet business and customer needs for reliability and availability.

Partner Development and Team Building – Providing partners with coaching, feedback, and developmental opportunities, and building effective teams: 

• Provides partners with coaching, feedback, and developmental opportunities.
• Ensures partners adhere to legal and operational compliance requirements. 
• Promote DevOps principles and culture across the software engineering organization.

Production Support for platform components

• Monitor and manage application performance and service quality, including initial troubleshooting, identification of root cases and issue resolution.
• Work closely with cross-functional stakeholders to analyze and troubleshoot complex production issues.
• Defines and maintains processes, procedures, and expectations for team’s production support responsibilities. 
• Ensures platform architecture, services, and platform support documentation are in place and up-to-date and available to multiple stakeholders. 
• Leads team through high severity platform related operational incidents. 

 Basic Qualifications 

• 8-10 years of professional industry experience with software development and operations 
• 5 years of leadership role in systems or application development projects of all sizes and complexities, including large systems 
• 3-5 years of leading or managing small technical teams 
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field 

Preferred Qualifications

Technical Proficiency 

• Ability to lead a group of technical experts that cohesively build and operate secure, durable, flexible, accessible solutions. Requires an understanding of relevant development languages, tools, frameworks, utilities and technical dependencies.
• Recognizes, values and champions high quality, reusable software with minimal defects on the team. 
• Working experience with product development teams in a platform engineering role is highly desirable.
• Ability to build automation tools for platform processes for various application pipeline.
• Working knowledge of application architecture, infrastructure and security concepts and technical implementation. 
• Aptitude to pick up new technologies and trends, as they become relevant for the business and our platforms. Examples include Graph DB, Big Data, REST Services, and incorporating cloud components.
• Expert in understanding of implications from design and implementation architecture choices toward building secure, scalable, durable, flexible, accessible solutions. 
• Strong knowledge of Azure, AWS or GCP and Cloud Computing concepts
• Strong hands-on coding and code review 
• Strong knowledge in best practices for: 

System Architecture and design. 

RDBMS and NoSQL 

Platform and infrastructure

Application. PaaS services

Monitoring, auditing, and operations

• In-depth working experience in a DevOps culture; one or more DevOps, Orchestration/Configuration Management and Continuous Integration technology (e.g. Docker/Kubernetes, Azure Devops, Jenkins, Ansible, Terraform, ELK stack, Splunk etc.) 
• Linux (Ubuntu, CoreOS, RedHat) and/or Microsoft Windows Server and associated technologies (Active Directory, Exchange etc.) 
• One or more Web and Application Server technologies (e.g. Apache Netty, Apache Tomcat, Nginx) 
• Networking protocols such as HTTP, DNS and TCP/IP 
• One or more version control platform (e.g. Git) 
• Experience managing full application stacks from the OS up through custom applications 
• Expert in analyzing and troubleshooting applications.
• Knowledge in AIOps and machine learning is a plus.

Domain Proficiency 

• Broad and deep understanding of relevant platform and applications capabilities, including established API’s, system activity components, process flows, the underlying data model, implementation specifics of important business rules, batch jobs, user interface components, and application configuration.
• Familiarity and curiosity in the business context and trends, as well as the business customers’ opportunities. Awareness of the functional aspects of the solution.
• Product platform life cycle - Strategy, development and deployment
• Help define overall platform evolvement strategies and procedures
• Help define operational processes to ensure predictable software development outcomes; refine Information Security processes and procedures.
• Develop, recommend, evaluate, integrate, deploy, and maintain security tools including security framework.
• Evaluate software security products and technologies.
• Develop and deploy solutions in Agile methodology, with continuous delivery processes

Interpersonal Skills 

• Ability to lead and influence cross functional teams that include architects, analysts, developers and QA analysts
• Ability to articulate ideas, using facts and data, for solutions to both technical and business communities
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills
• Ability to influence and negotiate strategy and roadmaps in planning exercises
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Ability to balance multiple priorities and meet deadlines
• Ability to make timely and effective decisions using a mixture of intuition, analysis, experience and judgment