Principal Production Engineer- Retail Hardware

Now Brewing – Principal Production Engineer, Retail Hardware

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 the 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 the helpdesk respond to alerts barely scales to the store of today, and when one new thing is deployed to just our North American 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 principal engineer will define and deliver engineering efforts, as well as help grow and lead production engineering within 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 all 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:

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• Technical Leadership and mentoring
  
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  • Serve as a hands-on, cross-functional lead for retail deployments of a variety of 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 day 2 fleet management &
    operational support
    
  • Lead the production engineering team through the solution design process, shaping and guiding systems approach and technical design, and driving continual improvement for existing platforms in collaboration with stakeholders.
    
  • Coach team members, and work with the manager to assess and improve team capabilities through development opportunities.
    
  • Collaborate with other principal-level engineers across retail technology to share best practices and tooling and drive toward greater standardization and interoperability.
    
  
  
  
• Engineering Stewardship
  
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  • Establish, maintain, and improve engineering standards and best practices in configuration management &
    automation, monitoring &
    alerting, software build &
    deployment, performanceoptimization, reliability, and scalability.
    
  • 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.
    
  • Promote production engineering principles and culture across the team’s production engineers and product developers, its embedded technical product managers, and out into the wider retail technology organization.