engineer lead, SRE - ST
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Oct 14, 2026. First seen by Alion on Oct 12, 2026. Starbucks scores B on the Alion truth index.
Now Brewing - SRE engineer lead! #tobeapartner
From the beginning, Starbucks set out to be a different kind of company. One that not only celebrated coffee and the rich tradition, but that also brought a feeling of connection. We are known for developing extraordinary leaders who share this passion and are guided by their service to others.
The SRE Engineering Lead will lead the reliability, availability, and performance of critical Starbucks technology platforms. This role will build and develop the SRE team, establish reliability and observability standards, drive automation and operational improvements, and partner across engineering teams to ensure systems are resilient, scalable, secure, and ready for peak business demand.
As a SRE engineer lead, you will…
- Own Reliability: Drive system availability, performance, resilience, and operational readiness.
- Engineer for Scale: Automate operations, strengthen observability, and reduce recurring issues and toil.
- Lead SRE Excellence: Build the SRE team and establish standards for incident management, SLOs, capacity, and recovery.
We’d love to hear from people with:
- 8+ years of experience in software engineering, systems engineering, site reliability engineering, cloud engineering, or platform engineering.
- 2 years of leading teams of four or more software developers
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or related field
Preferred Qualifications
- Strong experience building and operating reliable distributed systems at scale.
- Expertise in cloud platforms including AWS and/or Azure.
- Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, container orchestration, and cloud-native architectures.
- Deep understanding of reliability engineering principles including:
- SLIs
- SLOs
- Error Budgets
- Capacity Planning
- Availability Engineering
- Chaos Testing
- Disaster Recovery
- Performance Engineering
- Experience implementing observability platforms such as Datadog, Splunk, Grafana, New Relic, Dynatrace, OpenTelemetry, or equivalent.
- Strong automation and software engineering skills utilizing Python, Go, Java, PowerShell, Bash, or similar languages.
- Experience with Infrastructure as Code solutions such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi.
- Experience with CI/CD and deployment platforms.
- Deep knowledge of networking fundamentals, DNS, load balancing, and distributed systems design.
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.
*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.
We believe we do our best work when we're together, which is why we're onsite four days a week.
Join us and inspire with every cup. Apply today!
Starbucks Coffee Company is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.
Qualified applicants with criminal histories will be considered for employment in a manner consistent with all federal, state and local ordinances.
Starbucks Coffee Company 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 [email protected] or 1(888) 611-2258.