manager, engineering - platform development

About the role

The Engineering Manager for our GenAI Platform team will lead a team of platform engineers in support of Starbucks' GenAI Accelerator charter. This role focuses on observability and audit, delivering high-quality, reliable, and scalable technology and automation solutions that power the platform—spanning our Agent Development Platform, Observability Platform, MCP gateway, and multi-cloud (AWS and Azure) infrastructure. The successful candidate will drive the enterprise-wide observability roadmap, democratize access to observability metrics, and grow a high-performing engineering team while navigating complex technology initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Team Leadership
  • Identify and communicate key responsibilities and practices to ensure the team promotes a successful attitude, confidence in leadership, and teamwork.
  • Hire, coach, and develop engineers; set clear performance expectations, deliver regular feedback, and grow the team's technical and career trajectory.
  • Provide coaching and mentoring to engineering partners across the organization.
• Technical Vision & Delivery
  • Define and drive the technical vision and roadmap for observability policies to ensure platforms remain reliable, performant, and observable.
  • Spearhead the design, development, and deployment of observability AI agents and tools, including:
    • Knowledge graphs and knowledge agents.
    • Advanced, context-aware code generation, completion, and refactoring.
    • AI-powered assistance for event triage, root cause analysis, and bug fixing.
    • Smart agents to optimize and augment developer testing and workflow automation.
  • Establish and evolve the service-level objective (SLO) framework, defining SLIs, error-budget policy, and reliability targets in partnership with developer teams.
  • Operationalize error budgets to guide prioritization and release decisions.
  • Drive alerting strategy and signal quality to reduce noise and alert fatigue.
  • Partner with teams to translate reliability data into actionable engineering outcomes.
  • Own and evolve the incident management lifecycle, from detection and response to root-cause analysis (RCA) and remediation.
  • Stay at the forefront of observability engineering, particularly in distributed tracing, telemetry pipelines, and OpenTelemetry (OTEL) standards.
  • Evaluate and integrate state-of-the-art observability platforms and tooling.
  • Develop and implement engineering solutions to improve efficiencies, increase capacity, and reduce costs, including telemetry retention, sampling, and ingestion strategy.
• Engineering Excellence
  • Integrate engineering principles and resolve technical obstacles for specific projects.
  • Apply logic in problem-solving and analysis of alternatives to assess financial and operational impact.
  • Support the development team and resolve developer issues in a timely and accurate fashion.
  • Ensure application and infrastructure architectural solutions are stable, secure, and compliant with company standards.
• Partnership
  • Establish cross-functional, collaborative relationships with business and technology partners.
  • Communicate highly complex ideas and concepts to non-technical peers and customers.
  • Partner with external vendors to support and advance the tools and platforms used.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional industry experience with software development.
• 2+ years of experience leading engineering teams, including direct people-management responsibilities (hiring, performance, and career development).
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field, or equivalent experience.
• Understanding of software development lifecycles, developer workflows, and tools.
• Experience building platforms, developer tooling, or shared infrastructure consumed by other engineering teams as internal customers.
• Experience setting up observability tools such as Splunk, Datadog, or New Relic for large enterprises.
• Working knowledge of infrastructure-as-code (e.g., Terraform) and cloud infrastructure (AWS and/or Azure).
• Solid understanding of modern AI architectures and techniques, including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and how LLM-based systems are built and operated.
• Experience with, or strong familiarity building, agentic AI systems and the tools that support them.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience managing medium-to-large-scale projects and cross-functional team leadership.
• 5+ years of experience in one or more of the following languages: Python, Go, Java, Perl, and/or Ruby.
• 3+ years of experience with large-scale distributed systems and client-server architectures.
• 3+ years of experience with service resiliency and observability for applications and computing platforms.
• Experience building and operating self-service developer platforms, internal developer portals, or paved-path/golden-path tooling at scale.
• Deep expertise with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), CI/CD, and multi-tenant platform design.
• Deep understanding of modern observability architectures and techniques, including OpenTelemetry (OTEL) instrumentation and telemetry pipeline design.
• Experience implementing SLO/SLI frameworks, ideally within an SRE or reliability-engineering practice supporting large-scale, mission-critical systems.
• Passion for improving developer experiences and a vision for the future of AI-assisted software development.
• Experience leading successful advocacy and training programs to drive the adoption of new technologies within a large engineering organization.
• Experience with cloud computing platforms (e.g., Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure), including multi-cloud environments.
• Knowledge and understanding of relevant legal and regulatory requirements, such as SOX, PCI, Data Protection, etc.
• Demonstrated experience implementing and managing high-capacity, mission-critical environments.
• Expertise in observability platforms and tools such as Datadog, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry (OTEL).

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, and other voluntary insurance benefits.
• Short-term and long-term disability, paid parental leave, family expansion reimbursement.
• Paid vacation from date of hire (accrual varies by state), sick time (1 hour for every 25 hours worked), eight paid holidays, and two personal days per year.
• 401(k) retirement plan with employer match, discounted company stock program (S.I.P.), Starbucks equity program (Bean Stock).
• Incentivized emergency savings and financial well-being tools.
• 100% upfront tuition coverage for a first-time bachelor’s degree through Arizona State University’s online program via the Starbucks College Achievement Plan.
• Student loan management resources and access to other educational opportunities.
• Backup care and DACA reimbursement.

This list is subject to change depending on collective bargaining in locations where partners have a certified bargaining representative. For additional information, visit starbucksbenefits.com.

Schedule

Onsite four days a week.