Principal Engineer - Store Systems

Company Background:

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.

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Seeking world-class talent to join the world’s leading distributor of automotive and industrial replacement parts and value-added services operating 5,500+ locations and servicing more than 20,000 locations in the U.S and Canada. Specifically, this role will function as the Principal Engineer of a newly formed team of Engineers to build the next generation commerce platforms king with a highly talented team, you'll play a key role to build and run one of the world’s largest automotive and industrial replacement parts operations.

This is a technical leadership role responsible for defining and guiding the architecture, engineering standards, and technology direction for store systems across NAPA. The role will provide hands‑on technical leadership across point-of-sale, store operations, edge/device platforms, integrations, reliability, and modernization efforts that improve Corporate Owned Store Associate, Customer, and Independent Store Owner experiences.

This individual must be a technologist and engineer at heart, comfortable setting technical direction while staying close enough to the work to guide execution, remove complexity, and raise engineering quality. The ideal candidate will bring deep technical judgment across store platforms, integrations, cloud-native services, distributed systems, and operational resilience, while helping teams make pragmatic architecture decisions that scale across a complex store environment.

Close collaboration and alignment with store operations, product, application development, infrastructure, security, data, and business teams will be required. As such, exceptional abilities in building strong working relationships, influencing across teams, and communicating complex technical direction in a clear, business‑relevant way will be required. The ability to mentor senior engineers, establish technical standards, and elevate engineering practices across Store systems will be critical.

• 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…