Sr. Lead Software Engineer, Customer Technology Solutions

Overview

In the last several years, Chick-fil-A has established its digital products as some of the premier customer experiences in the industry. The Chick-fil-A apps have soared to the top of their respective app stores several times throughout their history and have experienced exceptional growth of sales and usage along the way. As digital continues to be a larger and larger portion of overall Chick-fil-A transactions, we are constantly aiming to add capabilities to improve the customer experience while simultaneously maturing our tools and improving our security posture. The emergence of dedicated platform teams and an architecture built around core services has enabled our engineers to build targeted solutions for the audiences they are serving, while leading to an increasingly positive developer experience. This role presents an opportunity to be a part of the team that directly impacts the experiences of millions of customers every day.

 

The Sr. Lead Software Engineer in this position will lead the engineering effort for all things related to ordering and order fulfillment in our owned commerce platforms. With a vision to be radically convenient and remarkably human, the order and fulfillment experience is paramount to a positive customer interaction, so it is an area in which we are constantly innovating and aiming to improve. Solution discovery with specific outcomes in mind will be a critical aspect of this role. The expectation is for this engineer to partner with product managers, designers, and front-end engineers, representing technical feasibility and bringing innovative ideas for potential solutions.

 

In addition to solution discovery, the Sr. Lead Software Engineer will be the technical lead for the associated agile product team. They will be accountable for the system design and architecture of the tech stack within the domain. This includes the security, scalability, reliability, latency, and observability of all services owned by the team. They will also be responsible for support and incident response for those services, which means they will establish, maintain, and participate in an on-call rotation.

 

There is a base level expectation for all technical leads in our organization to set the standard for impeccable code quality and timely, constructive PR reviews within their respective team. However, we also expect this role to contribute to patterns and best practices that are to be used in the broader CTS and DTT engineering community, and work with their product owner to make sure the respective team stays in alignment. They need to be aware of how their services and infrastructure fit into the full tech stack of customer technology and navigate a fast-moving, constantly changing environment.

 

The ideal candidate must be extremely experienced with software development. The position requires a critical thinker, a problem solver, and a decisive leader. They must be able to respond urgently and operate smoothly in stressful situations. While not being responsible for HR management of the team, they are expected to mentor and guide other engineers with humility and patience. Candidates will be comfortable making daily technical decisions on their own and leading larger decisions that affect the experience of customers and the business of operators and team members in restaurants across the country.

 

This is an opportunity to work in a fun and fast-paced environment and solve problems with bright people across the business. It is uniquely positioned to contribute in a meaningful way to the growth and success of Chick-fil-A.

 

Our Flexible Future model offers a healthy mix of working in person and virtually, strengthening key elements of the Chick-fil-A culture by fostering collaboration and community.

 

Responsibilities

• Help to establish standard engineering practices and frameworks for the organization.
• Contribute to shared code and repositories for use by multiple teams.
• Make solution architecture decisions for the product and services owned by the team.
• Lead and be accountable for the delivery and operations of the team’s products and services.
• Execute and track major migrations with zero downtime.
• Contribute excellent code, adhering to best practices and setting a commendable example for the rest of the team.
• Keep software up to date with supported dependencies and security vulnerabilities addressed.
• Support the products and services owned by the team and continually learn and make changes to make them more supportable in the future.
• Interview candidates for new staff engineering positions.
• Provide useful and timely reviews of work produced by other engineers.
• Lead, mentor, and assess other staff engineers.
• Interview, select, onboard, and oversee contract engineers.
• Delegate engineering assignments & assess engineering performance.
• Work directly with product managers and designers, providing the lens of feasibility, to discover solutions that make our products better for customers.
• Help product owners and business stakeholders understand the most pressing engineering needs and ensure they are prioritized appropriately.
• Identify & propose emerging software engineering technologies, methodologies and/or approaches
• Guide team in adoption of Chick-fil-A software engineering standards.

 

Note - Working in a DevOps model, this opportunity includes both building and running solutions that could require off hours support. This support is shared amongst the team members to cover weekends and weeknights.  The goal is to design for failure and, using cloud-native infrastructure patterns, automate responses to possible issues so they can be worked during normal hours.

Minimum Qualifications

• Experience designing complex software solutions
• Expert-level knowledge in software design and development with Java, GoLang or other comparable languages
• Experience with Relational and Non-Relational databases
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools
• Experience with version control systems and code merging/branching; specific experience with git desirable
• Demonstrated experience developing and deploying applications via cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
• Proven ability to positively influence engineering culture and work collaboratively with functional team members and business stakeholders.
• Experience mentoring and leading a team
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills

 

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with test-driven development, continuous integration and deployment, Scrum discipline, or comparable software development practices
• Experience developing and delivering microservices
• Experience participating in product discovery activities
• Deep understanding of AWS architecture
• Experience working with an agile development methodology featuring sprints, points estimation, and daily standups
• Experience in design, data collection, and data analysis
• Familiarity with Agile principles as applied to software development

Minimum Years of Experience

5

Travel Requirements

10%

Required Level of Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent experience

Preferred Level of Education

Bachelor's Degree

Major/Concentration

Computer Engineering, Computer Science, or related Technical Field