Now Brewing – Site Reliability Engineer II, Digital Displays

The IOT & Retail Hardware organization spends most of its time out at the edges of the map. Naturally, this means lots of exploration—prototyping and building and testing for internal efforts or in collaboration with R&D teams.

But our work doesn’t stop when experiments do. POCs that test well and are bound for wider rollout must be operationalized to deploy at speed and run at scale. Platforms must be secure, performant, and resilient. And just about everything should be standardized and automated. This is the domain of production engineering, a.k.a. site reliability engineering…or systems engineering…or (sigh) devops. The industry can’t seem to agree on what to call the role, but what’s not in dispute is that our production engineers have been instrumental in our success, driving the reliability, security, scalability, and efficiency of our applications, infrastructure, and devices in cloud and retail environments.

And the role is only growing in importance as Starbucks accelerates introduction of new digital displays and other connected devices to the retail environment. Rolling out tens of thousands of things a year demands capabilities for highly automated, hands-off operation of distributed fleets of equipment, and we’re investing in roles that will help deliver engineering efforts and support our devices and platforms.

The right candidate will have a broad background in SRE/systems engineering and operational support, with expertise at application and infrastructure layers through the build / deploy / run lifecycle. Success will also require flexibility, proactive communication, and a hunger for feedback and growth. Our team works by iterating from ideas to prototypes to solid implementations, testing and correcting as new use cases emerge, and continually evolving best practices and re-evaluating tradeoffs as needs shift.

Summary of Key Responsibilities

Responsibilities and essential job functions include but are not limited to the following:

Production Support

• Tier 4 support of retail hardware & iot devices and the store partners using them

• Accept tickets handed off to the team, triage, engage other teams as needed, work issues to resolution. Capture root causes, critical incidents, and recurring issues for deeper engineering analysis.

• Lead ongoing knowledge transfer with tier 1-3 teams to gain insight into pain points and trending issues as well as provide guidance and feedback.

• Develop or refine procedures to allow service desk teams to handle more issues in house, triage complex problems faster, and gather better information for handoff to our team.

• Monitor and manage our equipment fleets, performing audit, updates, and other tasks. Where needed, coordinate with on-site techs for replacements or new installs.

• Engage with vendors where needed for RCA, troubleshooting, best practices, etc.

• Fulfill service requests for areas including devices, platforms, data, user access.

• Includes rotating oncall responsibility with the expectation of occasional off-hours support as needed for high impact issues.

Operational Engineering

• Continuous improvement of resilience, recoverability, efficiency, performance from an engineering mindset

• Identify opportunities to drive down the number and severity of incidents through improvements in information, processes, or technology. Work with team to design and implement robust solutions.

• Drive all the things up the automation maturity curve. Standardize frequently executed procedures. Research programmatic ways to do any and every task. Script device configuration, data gathering, health checks, troubleshooting actions, resolution steps. Implement scripted flows in automation frameworks or our pipeline services.

• Contribute to validation & test plans, writing criteria with deterministic and repeatable results and ensuring that other teams know what to provide and expect.

• Expand documentation and refine standards, peer reviewing with senior team members and communicating to external teams.

• Create, maintain, and report KPIs to measure our systems and processes

Team Collaboration

• Receive and respond to coaching and guidance from leaders and senior engineers. Seeks input and support as required. Works in an increasingly self-directed manner.

• Effective interaction with other partners, responding quickly and thoroughly to issues and requests.

• Provides constructive input and perspective to team conversations

• Effective in dealing with ambiguity

• Grows skills in negotiating within team, across IT, with business, with 3rd party vendors or systems

• Participates in prioritization of requests & initiatives

Basic Qualifications

• 1-4 years of professional industry experience with software development

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field

Preferred Qualifications

No software development experience or CS degree? We'd still love to hear from those with :

• 4 or more years experience in a SRE/systems engineering role

• Demonstrable expertise in most or all of the following:

• Technology delivery with expectation of 24x7 uptime and high scalability, especially in a tiered support environment

• Hardware – especially digital displays – at scale in a retail or commercial environment, with a focus on observability and automation

• Infrastructure, including networking, Linux OS fundamentals and provisioning, remote management, performance monitoring & tuning, authentication

• Automation, including OS and software config management, shell scripting, and observability tools. Experience with Python a big plus.

• Modern web architectures, with expertise in internet-facing protocols and technologies

…and can:

• Navigate easily across a broad spectrum of technologies and infrastructure while keeping a strong engineering mindset.

• Decompose complex problems into a clear set of needs and deliverables

• Create and implement designs that meet scalability, performance and optimization, supportability, and maintainability concerns

• Quickly pick up new technologies and trends as they become relevant for the business and our platforms.

• Understand data: how to capture, learn from, and leverage it in decision making

• Negotiate capably with internal and external customers and suppliers

• Communicate effectively with those of different levels of the org hierarchy and degrees of technical knowledge.

As a Starbucks partner, you (and your family) will have access to medical, dental, vision, basic and supplemental life insurance, and other voluntary insurance benefits. Partners have access to 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, and two personal days per year. Starbucks also offers eligible partners 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, and financial well-being tools. Additionally, Starbucks offers 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, and access to other educational opportunities. You will also have access to backup care and DACA reimbursement. Starbucks will comply with any applicable state and local laws regarding employee leave benefits, including, but not limited to providing time off pursuant to the Colorado Healthy Families and Workplaces Act, and in accordance with its plans and policies. This list is subject to change depending on collective bargaining in locations where partners have a certified bargaining representative. For additional information regarding partner perks and more detailed information about benefits, go to starbucksbenefits.com (file:///C:/Users/rofunk/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/INetCache/Content.Outlook/EHRXPAYM/starbucksbenefits.com) .

*If you are working in CA, CO, IL, LA, ME, MA, NE, ND or RI, you will accrue vacation up to a maximum of 120 hours (190 in CA) for roles below director and 200 hours (316 in CA) for roles at director or above. For roles in other states, you will be granted vacation time starting at 120 hours annually for roles below director and 200 hours annually for roles director and above.

The actual base pay offered to the successful candidate will be based on multiple factors, including but not limited to job-related knowledge/skills, experience, geographical location, and internal equity. At Starbucks, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at the high end of the range for their role, and compensation decisions are dependent upon the facts and circumstances of each position and candidate.

If you live in the greater Seattle area, we offer a flexible workplace that allows for hybrid work. Partners can work remotely up to two days per week.

Join us and inspire with every cup. Apply today!

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, sexual orientation, marital status, military or veteran status, gender identity and expression, genetic information, or any other factor protected by law.

We are committed to creating a diverse and welcoming workplace that includes partners with diverse backgrounds and experiences. We believe that enables us to better meet our mission and values while serving customers throughout our global communities. People of color, women, LGBTQIA+, veterans and persons with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with all federal state and local ordinances. Starbucks Corporation is committed to offering reasonable accommodations to job applicants with disabilities. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, please contact us at applicantaccommodation@starbucks.com .