Lead software engineer - Digital Partner - U.S

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.

You’ll be the technical lead for the backend and infrastructure behind a partner-facing application that helps store partners plan and get through their daily work. You’ll own the architecture, delivery, deployment, and production health of the services and cloud infrastructure that power it, and set the team’s technical direction. You’ll work with product, QA, and platform teams to ship reliable features that matter, including large, high-priority projects.

• Act as the technical lead for the backend and infrastructure. You’ll own architecture, delivery, deployment, monitoring, and production support for the Node.js/Type Script services and the GraphQL/REST APIs they expose.
• Set backend standards, patterns, and technical direction, including service boundaries, API design, data modeling, and schema composition across a federated GraphQL layer.
• Own the infrastructure-as-code behind the services you lead — provisioning app hosting, serverless functions, databases, caching, messaging, and secret stores via Terraform or an equivalent IaC tool.
• Lead technical design reviews, code reviews, and architecture discussions, and make sound engineering decisions.
• Break large projects into technical work the team can deliver, and coordinate dependencies with frontend, product, and platform teams.
• Design and operate the integration layer connecting your services to downstream REST APIs, GraphQL services, and third-party systems.
• Own CI/CD pipelines, release management, and environment health in the cloud, including certificate and secret rotation, blue/green deployments, and feature-flag rollout strategy.
• Work with QA to define and drive unit, integration, end-to-end, and contract testing for backend services.
• Lead troubleshooting and root-cause analysis across the API, authentication, data, and integration layers. Improve monitoring, alerting, and production health.
• Make sure services implement secure authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth2/OIDC, JWTs, service-to-service auth) and meet reliability and performance targets.
• Mentor and coach engineers and raise the technical bar across the team.
• Document architecture, support models, operational procedures, and technical decisions. Lead knowledge transfer when ownership changes hands.

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including leading backend or infrastructure delivery.
• Strong backend development skills in Node.js and Type Script (or equivalent, e.g. Java/Spring Boot, .NET).
• Strong grasp of service architecture, API design, data modeling, and distributed systems patterns.
• Experience designing and maintaining services that sit behind a federated GraphQL layer or API gateway.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform or equivalent) in production cloud environments.
• Experience setting backend standards, patterns, and technical direction across multiple services or teams.
• Experience integrating backend services with REST APIs, GraphQL services, and third-party/enterprise systems.
• Experience owning services end to end: architecture, delivery, deployment, monitoring, and production support.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, release management, and cloud-hosted services.
• Strong troubleshooting and root-cause analysis skills across API, authentication, data, and integration layers.
• Solid understanding of…