principal engineer- international technology & Starbucks digital solutions

As Principal Engineer, you will shape the technical direction for EMEA within Starbucks Digital Solutions, aligning with global strategy. You’ll influence platform choices, drive modernization, and foster engineering excellence across regions and partners. Collaborating with product, security, and infrastructure teams, you’ll translate business aims into scalable, secure, and resilient solutions. This role offers autonomy to lead strategic initiatives and possibly build future engineering teams in International markets. You will engage with executives and engineers alike to deliver tangible value and long-term competitive advantage.

• flexible working policy (hybrid in London)
• remote work options
• travel opportunities
• store partner exposure
• collaboration with global teams
• supportive recruitment and coaching environment

• Set and influence the technical direction for EMEA capabilities aligned to global strategy
• Act as trusted technical advisor to senior leaders
• Provide recommendations on technology investments and build-vs-buy decisions
• Drive platform modernization and ownership of strategic systems
• Lead architecture reviews and guide solution design and implementation
• Champion testing, observability, security, automation and operational excellence
• Partner with product teams to deliver business outcomes through sustainable technical solutions
• Shape integration strategies across SaaS, cloud-native and custom solutions
• Collaborate with global technology and DXS teams to align priorities
• Expand internal engineering capability and coach engineers and leaders
• Support recruitment, capability assessment and succession planning
• Develop an engineering career path and capability framework for the region
• Balance speed, scalability, maintainability, resilience, security and cost in decisions

• Significant software engineering and technical leadership experience in complex enterprises
• Proven ability to influence technical strategy across multiple teams or domains
• Experience leading technology transformation or platform modernization initiatives
• Experience in highly matrixed, global organisations
• Strong full-stack expertise across modern architectures, APIs, integrations and Azure
• Deep understanding of design patterns, system design and security
• Experience with DevOps, CI/CD, automation, observability
• Ability to assess vendor architectures and balance SaaS vs in-house capabilities
• Strong stakeholder management and ability to influence without authority
• Experience working with distributed teams in retail/digital commerce environment (Desirable)

• Excellent communication to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Stakeholder management and influence without authority
• Cross-cultural collaboration and consensus-building
• Full-stack engineering with cloud-native platforms (Azure)
• Event-driven architectures, API-first design
• DevOps, CI/CD, automation, observability