Starbucks · 1 day ago
release engineer lead
Seattle, WA
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
8+ years expStarbucks is a company that celebrates coffee and connection, and they are seeking a Release Engineer Lead to enhance their Release Engineering team. This role involves ensuring reliability and scalability for CI/CD solutions, driving strategy and architecture for releases, and partnering with various engineering teams to influence and prioritize initiatives.
CoffeeFood and BeverageRestaurantsTea
Responsibilities
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
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)
Qualification
Required
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)
Benefits
Medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance
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
Two personal days per year
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
Financial well-being tools
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
Access to other educational opportunities
Backup care and DACA reimbursement
Company
Starbucks
Starbucks is a restaurant chain that serves handcrafted ready-to-drink beverages, including coffee, tea, juices, and snack food items.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Starbucks has a track record of offering H1B sponsorships. Please note that this does not
guarantee sponsorship for this specific role. Below presents additional info for your
reference. (Data Powered by US Department of Labor)
Distribution of Different Job Fields Receiving Sponsorship
Represents job field similar to this job
Trends of Total Sponsorships
2025 (208)
2024 (127)
2023 (130)
2022 (172)
2021 (146)
2020 (149)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
$2.65BKey Investors
Elliott Management Corp.Pershing Square Capital Management
2025-05-06Post Ipo Debt· $1.75B
2024-07-19Post Ipo Equity
2018-10-10Post Ipo Equity· $900M
Leadership Team
Brian R. Niccol
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Cathy R. Smith
CFO
Recent News
Morningstar.com
2026-01-23
2026-01-23
Company data provided by crunchbase