About the role
Responsibilities:
- As a Principal Software Engineer, you will shape the long-term technical direction of how Nike's enterprise consumes Marketplace and Nike Direct data.
- You will define the multi-year architecture for our governed consumption layers — APIs, ontology/semantic models, agentic layers, and data quality systems.
- You will drive a single source of truth for Nike Direct and Marketplace data across the enterprise, in partnership with BI Experience teams.
- You will lead the aggressive simplification and unification of our data products landscape — picking which systems live, which get decommissioned, and how teams migrate safely.
- You will co-design with BI Experience teams the agentic and AI-powered consumption experiences that change how business users discover health, insights, and actions.
- You will set engineering standards (testing, observability, security, performance) and ensure they are adopted consistently across the org& #39; s repos.
- You will influence the Platform team& #39; s toolkit, blueprints, and patterns to make sure they serve Marketplace data use cases at scale.
- You will mentor Leads and Senior engineers across multiple squads, and represent the organisation in cross-Nike architecture and governance forums.
- You will write and ship code on the highest-leverage problems — staying close enough to the keyboard to make decisions credibly.
Requirements:
- We are looking for a hands-on technical leader with deep systems intuition, strong opinions held loosely, and a proven record of driving enterprise-wide outcomes.
- A minimum of 10+ years of software and data engineering experience, including time as a senior or lead IC at a large-scale data-driven company.
- Mastery of multiple backend languages (Java, Python, Scala) and deep expertise in distributed systems, data modeling, and API design.
- Architect-level fluency with modern data platforms — Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalogue, Iceberg, Trino, dbt, or equivalents — and with streaming systems (Kafka, Flink).
- Proven experience designing enterprise consumption layers — semantic/ontology layers, governed APIs, metric stores, agentic/LLM-powered analytics surfaces.
- Strong cloud architecture expertise across AWS, GCP, or Azure: security, cost, resilience, multi-region.
- A track record of driving large-scale simplifications, decommissions, and migrations across many teams.
- Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy, write influential design documents, and align senior leaders.
- Experience partnering with Platform, Security, and Governance organisations to shape enterprise standards.
- Exceptional written and verbal communication; equally comfortable in deep-code reviews and exec briefings.
- Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science or related field — or equivalent experience.
- Preferred: published technical writing, open-source contributions, prior experience leading data-product platforms at retail/commerce/consumer scale.