Kroger · 8 hours ago
Lead Software Engineer (Search)
Cincinnati Metro
Full-time
Onsite
Senior Level, Lead/Staff
8+ years expKroger is seeking a hands-on Software Engineering Lead to serve as the technical lead for their Search Core team. In this role, you will guide implementation decisions and software delivery for the search platform, ensuring it is performant, reliable, and easy to extend.
GroceryMarketingMeat and PoultryRetailRetail Technology
Responsibilities
Lead the development implementation of technology strategy within a defined set of teams. Executes against defined technology roadmap to support project portfolio and business strategy
Oversee the implementation of enterprise standards across domains: operations, infrastructure, data, applications, development, security & risk, and business continuance
Draft and review architectural diagrams, interface specifications, class structures and, other design documents
Drive digital innovation by leveraging innovative new technologies and approaches to renovate, extend, and, transform the existing core technology base
Implement high-level migration plans to address the gaps between the current and future state, typically in sync with the budgeting or other capital planning processes
Mentor team members in software development principles, patterns, processes and, practices
Must be able to perform the essential job functions of this position with or without reasonable accommodation
Qualification
Required
8+ years of professional software engineering experience; 3+ years in technical leadership or staff/lead roles
Proven track record building and operating large-scale, low-latency, highly available services supporting millions of daily queries
Strong product mindset: balances relevance/quality, performance, reliability, and cost
Expert in Java (modern frameworks such as Spring Boot/Dropwizard/Quarkus) and production-quality Python
Strong API design (REST/gRPC), contract-first development, pagination, rate limiting, idempotency
Event-driven and streaming patterns (Pub/Sub, Kafka or equivalent), backpressure handling, exactly/at‑least‑once semantics
Caching strategies (CDN, Redis/Memcached, request/result caching, cache invalidation patterns)
Hands-on in GCP: GKE, Cloud Run, Compute Engine, Pub/Sub, Cloud Load Balancing, VPC, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL/Bigtable/BigQuery (as applicable)
Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/Helm), environment promotion strategies, secrets management (Secret Manager)
Cost awareness: index/storage lifecycle policies, compute/capacity rightsizing, observability-driven optimization
Expertise in latency/throughput tuning, tail-latency mitigation, circuit breakers, retries with jitter, timeouts, bulkheads
Experience defining and meeting SLOs/SLIs, capacity planning, load testing (e.g., Gatling/k6/Locust), and chaos/resiliency testing
SRE practices: incident response, on-call readiness, runbooks, postmortems, error budget
Operational familiarity with data ingestion and index pipelines (Airflow/Cloud Composer, Dataflow/Beam, Spark as relevant)
Schema evolution, reindexing strategies, blue/green index rollouts, partial updates, incremental refresh
Data quality checks, SLAs on freshness, and lineage/observability for pipelines
End-to-end observability (OpenTelemetry, Cloud Monitoring/Logging, Prometheus/Grafana), distributed tracing and log correlation
CI/CD at scale (GitHub Actions/Cloud Build/Jenkins), canary and progressive delivery, automated rollback
High bar for test automation (unit, contract, integration, performance, chaos), mocking of external dependencies
Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional initiatives with Product, Data Science, Platform, and SRE
Mentors engineers, levels up coding standards, code reviews, and architecture practices
Clear written and verbal communication; can present tradeoffs and influence roadmap and investment decisions
Company
Kroger
Kroger is a grocery retail store that provides a wide variety of product for customers and community.
10001+ employees
H1B Sponsorship
Kroger 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 (68)
2024 (64)
2023 (71)
2022 (63)
2021 (20)
2020 (29)
Funding
Current Stage
Public CompanyTotal Funding
unknown1984-09-28IPO
Leadership Team
Ronald Sargent
Interim Chief Executive Officer
Recent News
2026-01-16
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2026-01-11
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