**Now Brewing – Release Engineer Lead! #tobeapartner** From the beginning, Starbucks set out to be a different kind of company. One that not only celebrated coffee and the rich tradition, but that also brought a feeling of connection. We are known for developing extraordinary leaders who share this passion and are guided by their service to others. As a lead engineer, you’ll contribute to the success of the Starbucks Coffeehouse Release Engineering team by ensuring reliability and scalability for our CI/CD solutions. You will ensure design, build, test and deploy capabilities across a distributed retail ecosystem (store devices, in-store services, back-of-house systems, point of sale, and cloud) with a customer-first approach. You’ll continue driving the strategy and architecture approach for releases, champion security by design, and help deliver a user-centric control plane/UI dashboard that gives business and operations real-time visibility. You’ll be a key partner to Development, Security, Cloud, QA and Edge engineering—aligning stakeholders, influencing outcomes with release engineering best-practices, and crafting mutually agreed solutions that accelerate delivery safely. The ideal candidate brings expertise in CI/CD automation, deployments and release governance. This role requires an equal balance of strategic leadership and tactical execution. **_As an Engineer Lead, you will…_** **Strategic** + Define and continuously improve the release strategy and (branching, build versioning, security scans, approval gates, deployment, rollbacks, SLAs) and release engineering governance (coding, testing, documentation) for distributed retail services (edge and cloud). + Align with business objectives and develop OKRs for clarity and visibility. + Execute and deliver by contributing to the Release Engineering roadmap, prioritization of the team’s work, refining and continuously improving any processes based on customer or team feedback and retrospectives. + Partner with cross-functional engineering, security, cloud infrastructure and architecture teams to influence and prioritize high-value initiatives. + Define reliable deployment patterns and policies that meet business requirements at scale securely (POCs, Canary, blue/green). + Represent release engineering in initiative and planning discussions providing insights on risk, scalability and customer impact. + Manage the team by providing feedback, mentoring, coaching and demonstrate leadership behavior based on Starbucks core values. **Tactical** + Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines, versioning automation, and artifact signing processes. + Develop and enhance control plane dashboards for release orchestration and operational visibility. + Troubleshoot deployment issues across store devices, edge systems, and cloud services. + Create and enforce runbooks, playbooks, and rollback strategies for safe, repeatable deployments. + Mentor engineers, conduct design reviews, and ensure adherence to coding and security standards. + Perform hands-on configuration management, infrastructure-as-code, and progressive delivery (canary, blue/green, ring deployments). **_We’d love to hear from people with:_** + 8-10 years of professional industry experience with software development + 2 years of leading teams of four or more software developers + Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field + Demonstrated thought leadership who can align teams and stakeholders. + Natural ability to lean in, be curious and drive for enablement with a team of 5-7 people. + Systems thinking mindset who understands the customer journey, platform dependencies and operational requirements for a reliable end to end release ecosystem. + Proven experience deploying distributed services/software across retail (stores, edge devices, POS) and cloud backends. + Expertise in CI/CD (e.g. ADO, GitHub Actions, Jenkins) and config management (Chef, Ansible). + Strong security engineering background (vuln management, secrets management, SBOMs). + Strong built-in SRE approach to ensure systems are reliability, scalable and efficient.(Observability, Incident Management, Automation, IaC, etc.) + Cloud experience (Azure, AWS), container orchestration (Kubernetes, edge K3s). + Hands-on operational support (On-call rotation, PagerDuty, ServiceNow, Jira). + Ability to influence and partner across engineering, product, and operations; skilled in executive-ready communication. + Experience defining and executing roadmaps in complex, multi-stakeholder environments. + Familiarity with networking, edge constraints, and offline/poor-connectivity scenarios common to retail. + Solid understanding of UX/UI principles for operational dashboards; ability to collaborate with design and front-end teams. + Experience with control plane development for release orchestration; event-driven pipelines and GitOps models (ArgoCD/Flux). As a Starbucks partner, you (and your family) will have access to medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, and other voluntary insurance benefits. Partners have access to short-term and long-term disability, paid parental leave, family expansion reimbursement, paid vacation from date of hire*, sick time (accrued at 1 hour for every 25 hours worked), eight paid holidays, and two personal days per year. Starbucks also offers eligible partners participation in a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match, a discounted company stock program (S.I.P.), Starbucks equity program (Bean Stock), incentivized emergency savings, and financial well-being tools. Additionally, Starbucks offers 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. You will also have access to backup care and DACA reimbursement. Starbucks will comply with any applicable state and local laws regarding employee leave benefits, including, but not limited to providing time off pursuant to the Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act, and in accordance with its plans and policies. This list is subject to change depending on collective bargaining in locations where partners have a certified bargaining representative. For additional information regarding partner perks and more detailed information about benefits, go to starbucksbenefits.com (file:///C:/Users/rofunk/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/Content.Outlook/EHRXPAYM/starbucksbenefits.com) . *If you are working in CA, CO, IL, LA, ME, MA, NE, ND or RI, you will accrue vacation up to a maximum of 120 hours (190 in CA) for roles below director and 200 hours (316 in CA) for roles at director or above. For roles in other states, you will be granted vacation time starting at 120 hours annually for roles below director and 200 hours annually for roles director and above. The actual base pay offered to the successful candidate will be based on multiple factors, including but not limited to job-related knowledge/skills, experience, geographical location, and internal equity. At Starbucks, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at the high end of the range for their role, and compensation decisions are dependent upon the facts and circumstances of each position and candidate. We believe we do our best work when we're together, which is why we're onsite four days a week. **Join us and inspire with every cup. Apply today!** _Starbucks Coffee Company is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law._ _Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with all federal, state and local ordinances._ _Starbucks Coffee Company 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_ _or 1(888) 611-2258._ [CM1]