Lead Software Engineer

Become a Part of the NIKE, Inc. Team

NIKE, Inc. brings innovation and inspiration to every athlete in the world and offers a diverse, inclusive environment for professional development.

Who You'll Work With

You will report to the Senior Engineering team and serve as the technical leader for a data product squad. You will partner with Product Managers, Architects, BI Experience leads, and engineering leads across Nike to define strategy and roadmaps for consumption and ontology layers.

Who We Are Looking For

• 7–10 years of backend and/or data engineering experience.
• Deep expertise in Java, Python, or Scala, with strong SQL and data-modeling skills.
• Experience designing distributed systems and data products, including microservices, REST or GraphQL APIs, event-driven architectures, and batch or streaming pipelines.
• Hands-on experience with Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog or equivalent, and orchestration tools such as Airflow.
• Strong cloud experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure, including networking, IAM, secrets, and cost-aware architecture.
• Ability to lead technical design reviews, define APIs and data contracts, and build consensus across teams.
• Track record of mentoring engineers through code reviews, design coaching, and career growth conversations.
• Experience with observability and SRE practices, including metrics, tracing, alerting, error budgets, and on-call leadership.
• Comfort with TDD, modern CI/CD, and AI engineering tools such as GitHub Copilot.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• Preferred experience includes data governance, RLS/ABAC, ontology or semantic layers, dbt, agentic or LLM-powered analytics layers, or large-scale BI platforms.

What You'll Work On

• Own the technical direction of a data product squad serving Nike Direct, Wholesale Demand, Inventory, 3PP Demand, Customer Dimensional data, WFM, Clickstream, Member, or Orderbook.
• Lead the design of consumption layers, APIs, and pipelines used by BI Experience teams.
• Simplify and unify Nike's data product landscape while improving consistency and reducing KLO/TCO.
• Co-create agentic and ontology-driven consumption experiences with BI Experience teams.
• Own production reliability, scalability, and security, including incident response, capacity planning, and operational quality.
• Mentor and grow SWE I and SWE II engineers through reviews, pairing, and design coaching.
• Partner with the Platform team on toolkits, blueprints, and patterns.
• Represent the team in cross-organizational architecture forums and influence Nike's broader data architecture.

NIKE, Inc. offers a generous total rewards package, a casual work environment, a diverse and inclusive culture, and opportunities for professional development. NIKE, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer.