Lead Developer - Back End

OVERVIEW

Live the experience. From professional empowerment to continual learning opportunities. From ongoing investment in new and emerging technologies to a career of self‑determination. At Ulta Beauty, our tech team is critical to our scalability—and is recognized that way. We’ve been defined as a “mature start‑up.” A place where interdepartmental exposure, open doors, and genuine collaboration is ubiquitous. Where challenges come fast and furious, requiring agility, mental dexterity, and creativity.

Where our passion for better solutions drives us and is core to who we are.

We’re engineering for the future of retail, and it’s no‑holds‑barred. But for those motivated by continual change and ambiguity, by superior leadership, by whip‑smart colleagues who will press you daily for your very best, you’ll find that virtually nothing’s impossible at Ulta Beauty.

Ulta Beauty’s Consumer Technology organization is seeking a passionate, hands‑on Lead Engineer to drive next‑generation digital commerce experiences. This role sits at the intersection of engineering excellence and intelligent automation – leading a high‑performing team to design, build, and scale modern, cloud‑native applications that power Ulta’s eCommerce and omnichannel experiences. You will be both a builder and a mentor, ensuring technical rigor while helping evolve our SDLC through AI‑powered developer tools, intelligent code generation, and automation‑first engineering culture.

• Design & Delivery Excellence – Translate business and product requirements into robust low‑level designs, ensuring scalability, observability, and reliability with high code quality while providing technical leadership to the development team and mentoring team members.
• AI‑Driven Engineering Enablement – Enable and scale adoption of emerging tools that enhance developer productivity through AI (e.g., code generation, automated test creation, pair programming assistants, code review copilots, etc.).
• Cross‑Functional Collaboration – Partner with Architects, Product, QE, and SRE teams to deliver business‑critical features and technical foundations.
• Thought Leadership – Stay current with AI, Dev Ops, and cloud‑native trends. Contribute to architectural direction, technical proof‑of‑concepts, and developer enablement initiatives.
• Problem Solving & Performance Tuning – Investigate production and performance issues, execute root‑cause analyses, and lead rapid, sustainable resolutions.
• Rapid Prototyping & POCs — Drive quick proof‑of‑concepts to test new architecture patterns. Evaluate outcomes, share learnings, and recommend adoption for broader engineering use.

This isn’t just a lead engineering role – it’s an opportunity to shape how a leading beauty retailer builds software in the AI era. You’ll combine deep hands‑on engineering with forward‑looking innovation – empowering teams to code smarter, deliver faster, and scale elegantly through intelligent automation and AI‑enabled development.

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 10+ years of experience in software development, with 3+ years in a technical lead role.
• Deep expertise in Java 17+, Spring Boot, reactive programming, and MACH‑aligned architectures (microservices, API‑first, cloud‑native, headless).
• Strong experience of event‑driven architectures and messaging (Google Pub/Sub or similar) and streaming (Kafka or similar) systems.
• Proven experience delivering large‑scale, customer‑facing, cloud‑native systems (preferably on Google Cloud Platform
  ).
• Familiarity with Tooling & Platforms: JUnit 5, Mockito, Testcontainers;
  Sonar Qube and code quality gates;
  OpenAPI 3.0 (design‑first, Swagger UI), contract testing (Pact); observability with Dynatrace/New Relic and Open Telemetry
  ; performance/memory profiling (JFR, Eclipse MAT, JProfiler); streaming with Kafka (producers/consumers, schemas). Or equivalent tools.
• Hands‑on experience with No
  
  SQL (Mongo
  
  DB, Redis) and relational databases.
• Familiarity with AI‑assisted development tools such as Gemini Code assist or similar.
• Working…