data engineer lead

Job Summary and Mission

This position contributes to Starbucks' success by leading a data engineering team in building enterprise data services for analytic solutions. This position is responsible for leading the design, development, testing, and support for data pipelines and data products to enable continuous data processing for data exploration, data preparation, and real-time business analytics.

Models and acts in accordance with Starbucks' guiding principles.

Summary of Key Responsibilities

This position must have a strong background in data engineering including:

1. Demonstrate deep knowledge of the data engineering domain, including non-interactive (batch, distributed) & real-time, highly available data, data pipelines.
2. Deep knowledge of data as a concept and the development of domain-driven data products.
3. Optimization of data products to service customer personas, Data Science, AI/ML, and data visualization.
4. Build fault-tolerant, self-healing, adaptive, and highly accurate data computational pipelines.
5. Provide consultation and lead the implementation of complex programs.
6. Develop and maintain documentation relating to all assigned systems and projects.
7. Perform root cause analysis to identify permanent resolutions to software or business process issues.
8. Implement monitoring and logging as part of solutions.

1. Lead discussions with other technical teams that are participating in solution delivery.
2. Lead discussions about technical alternatives and respectively champion their point of view.
3. Facilitate technical decision-making by negotiating priorities, options, and tradeoffs within the solution delivery team and amongst source and consumer teams.
4. Assist team members and peers in learning technical skills and business acumen.
5. Provide recommendations to the solution delivery team for resource allocations and actively participate in backlog grooming and iterative planning.
6. Lead the development of user stories from approved epics.
7. Understand new business and technical requirements of the solution and how those requirements impact existing requirements.
8. Create, maintain, and improve team coding standards.
9. Establish documentation standards for the team and review/approve documentation as necessary.
10. Evaluate proposed designs and design decisions to ensure reduced TCO.
11. Evangelize data literacy and development best practices among peer and consumer teams.

Basic Qualifications
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, management information systems, or related discipline, or equivalent work experience.
MUST HAVE Technology skills:

1. Strong/expert Spark (PySpark) using Jupyter Notebooks, Colab, or DataBricks.
2. Hands-on data pipeline development, ingest patterns in Azure.
3. Orchestration tools, ADF or Airflow.
4. SQL.
5. Denormalized Data modeling for big data systems.

MUST HAVE competencies:

1. Collaborative, able to work remotely, and still be an engaging team member.
2. Strong analytical and design skills.
3. Demonstrated track record of servant leadership.
4. Demonstrated bias for action and initiative.
5. Demonstrated capability to innovate without direct supervision.
6. Strong written, verbal, and active listening skills.

The pay range for this position may be narrower than that displayed, depending on where the work is performed.

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