Principal Engineer - Store Systems

Established in 1928, Genuine Parts Company is a leading global service provider of automotive and industrial replacement parts and value-added solutions. Our Automotive Parts Group operates across the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australasia, France, the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal, while our Industrial Parts Group serves customers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and Australasia. We keep the world moving with a vast network of over 10,700 locations spanning 17 countries supported by more than 63,000 teammates.

About the Role

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to join a newly formed team building the next generation of commerce platforms at GPC. This technical leadership role will define and guide the architecture, engineering standards, and technology direction for store systems across NAPA. The role involves hands-on technical leadership across point-of-sale, store operations, edge/device platforms, integrations, reliability, and modernization efforts to improve experiences for Corporate Owned Store Associates, Customers, and Independent Store Owners. The ideal candidate will bring deep technical judgment across store platforms, integrations, cloud-native services, distributed systems, and operational resilience while mentoring senior engineers and elevating engineering practices.

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the long-term technical vision, architecture, and engineering standards for Store systems, ensuring alignment with business priorities, product roadmaps, operational needs, and enterprise technology strategy.
• Develop strategic technical initiatives that modernize Store systems, improve reliability and performance, simplify operations, and enable scalable capabilities across company-owned and independently owned stores.
• Engage with vendors, enterprise architecture, infrastructure, security, and industry leaders to evaluate technologies that strengthen store platforms, edge computing, device management, integration patterns, and operational resilience.
• Foster out-of-the-box thinking within the team to encourage innovative approaches to complex problems, leading to more creative and effective solutions.
• Analyze the end-to-end store technology value chain, including point-of-sale, pricing, inventory, catalog, payments, order management, fulfillment, delivery, device management, and support processes, to identify opportunities to reduce friction and improve store execution.
• Collaborate with senior leaders to integrate Store systems architecture and modernization priorities with business, product, operations, security, data, and enterprise technology roadmaps.
• Define and guide enterprise integration patterns, messaging frameworks, event-driven services, APIs, and cloud-native architecture that enable resilient, scalable, and observable Store systems.
• Design and guide distributed applications for remote discovery, monitoring, configuration, lifecycle management, and support of store devices, edge infrastructure, and IoT-enabled capabilities.
• Define key performance indicators for Store systems, including reliability, performance, availability, incident reduction, store adoption, operational efficiency, transaction success, and business impact; monitor the effectiveness of technical initiatives against those outcomes.
• Implement and continuously improve the technical standards, engineering patterns, observability practices, automation, and operational tooling required to support reliable and scalable Store systems.
• Communicate the architecture to stakeholders and collaborate with existing domain architects in the formalization and adoption of IT standards and procedures.
• Lead architecture, design, code, and operational readiness reviews with engineering teams to ensure Store systems are secure, scalable, reliable, supportable, and aligned with enterprise standards.
• Provide oversight on delivery to ensure industry best practices, standards, automation, quality, timeliness, operational readiness, continuous improvement, and cost-effective solutions.
• Partner with Unified Experience, Product, UX, Architecture, and Engineering teams to define how Store Systems capabilities are exposed through unified associate, customer, call center, and owner experiences.
• Own technical leadership for Store systems modernization by partnering with product and engineering teams to evolve legacy platforms, reduce operational complexity, improve integration quality, and create reusable patterns that accelerate delivery across store capabilities.
• Other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years’ experience in software engineering and technology, with 5+ years in a senior technical leadership role guiding architecture, engineering standards, and delivery for complex enterprise platforms, preferably in retail, store operations, commerce, supply chain, or distributed systems environments.
• Expert knowledge of modern software development practices, including Agile, DevOps, Lean, Kanban, and SAFe, with experience scaling delivery practices across large engineering teams.
• Hands-on experience with modern cloud-native engineering stacks, including Java/Spring Boot, Python, Node.js, GCP/AWS/Azure, APIs, microservices, Pub/Sub or equivalent messaging, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, observability, CI/CD automation, and real-time processing pipelines.
• Experience leading enterprise-scale integrations across Store systems, POS platforms, store operations workflows, WMS, OMS, TMS, ERP, warehouse automation, payments, pricing, inventory, catalog, carrier, automation, and customer-facing platforms.
• Deep understanding of store technology platforms, distributed systems, edge computing, device management, IoT-enabled store devices, APIs, event-driven architecture, observability, and operational support models.
• Strong engineering discipline across data integration patterns, design patterns, test-driven development, unit testing, performance engineering, destructive testing, and scalable quality practices.
• Experience designing or defining lightweight warehouse management capabilities that support store and fulfillment operations.

Preferred Experience

• AI-enabled engineering capabilities, including policy enforcement, LLM routing, and multi-agent orchestration frameworks in secure enterprise environments.
• Standardizing operational templates across multi-store, multi-warehouse, and 3PL networks.
• Delivering measurable business impact, including reduced cost, faster onboarding, improved throughput, higher reliability, and better operational efficiency.
• AI-enabled engineering tools and practices supporting productivity, documentation, testing, analysis, coding, prototyping, and operational support.

Skills

• Excellent oral and written communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical decisions, tradeoffs, risks, and business impacts to engineering teams, senior leaders, business partners, and operational stakeholders.

Location

GPC offers two work locations to choose from: Duluth or Atlanta office. We provide a Flexible Work Policy that permits eligible employees to work on a hybrid remote schedule.