Now Brewing – Senior Production Engineer, Retail Hardware & IOT

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 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 helpdesk respond to alerts barely scales to the store of today, and when one new thing deployed to just our North America 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 senior engineer will help define and deliver engineering efforts, as well as help shape standards and serve as a resource to junior members of 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 the 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 contributions to internal & project deliverables

o Hands-on retail deployments of a variety 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 defense-in-depth

§ Day 2 fleet management & operational support

o Own and drive deliverables in the solution design process

o Drive continual improvement for existing platforms in collaboration with stakeholders.

· Engineering excellence in culture, standards, and practices

o Maintain and improve engineering standards and best practices in configuration management & automation, monitoring & alerting, software build & deployment, performance optimization, reliability, and scalability.

o 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.

o Collaborate within our team and others to share best practices and tooling, as well as drive toward greater standardization and interoperability.

o Guide junior team members as needed, helping leads & management identify development opportunities.

We’d love to hear from people with:

· 4-8 years of professional industry experience with software development

· Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Successful candidates will be those who have:

· 5 or more years of professional industry experience in systems design & engineering and technical operations

· Demonstrated expertise in a mix of the following:

• Technology delivery with expectation of 24x7 uptime and high scalability, working in a tiered support environment

• Hardware – especially digital displays – at scale in a retail or commercial environment, with a focus on observability and automation

• Infrastructure, including networking, Linux OS fundamentals and provisioning, remote management, performance monitoring & tuning, authentication

• Automation, including OS and software config management, shell scripting, and observability tools. Experience with Python a big plus.

• Modern web architectures, with expertise in internet-facing protocols and technologies

…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

· Negotiate capably with internal and external customers and suppliers

· Communicate effectively with those of different levels of the org hierarchy and degrees of technical knowledge.

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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 applicantaccommodation@starbucks.com.