Lead Systems Engineer

Our Order Management System (OMS) is the platform behind how AutoZone fulfills orders across eCommerce (B2C, B2B) and in-store channels — processing millions of orders a year and growing. We're looking for a Lead Systems Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership across OMS: designing and building cloud-native services, setting technical direction for a team of engineers, and driving the modernization of legacy integrations (Mainframe, Talend, EDI).

This is a player-coach role. You'll spend real time in the codebase — designing services, reviewing code, resolving production issues — while also setting technical standards, mentoring engineers, and owning delivery across a functional area. You'll work closely with enterprise architects, product owners, and QA in a fast-moving environment that embraces AI-augmented development workflows.
 

Technical Leadership and Delivery
- Own end-to-end technical delivery for a functional area of OMS (e.g., Order Placement, Order Modifications, Order Lookup, Shipping/Routing), from design through production support
- Translate high-level business requirements into detailed functional requirements, technical designs, and development-ready JIRA tasks
- Lead technical design reviews and code reviews; set and enforce coding standards, architectural patterns, and clean-code practices across the team
- Drive technical readiness ahead of major release cycles — proactively surface risks, coverage gaps, and dependencies before development begins, not after

Hands-On Engineering
- Design and build scalable, cloud-native microservices using Java and Spring Boot, deployed on GCP (GKE)
- Architect solutions for high-throughput, event-driven workflows (Pub/Sub, Kafka-style messaging) with an eye toward fault tolerance, decoupling, and observability
- Maintain a consistent, visible individual contribution — commits, PRs, and production deployments — that sets the technical bar for the team

Team Development and Mentorship
- Mentor engineers through structured peer code review, technical coaching sessions, and module ownership assignments
- Build team self-sufficiency by delegating production deployment responsibility, module ownership, and meeting facilitation to grow junior and mid-level engineers
- Champion AI-assisted engineering practices (e.g., Claude Code) across the team to accelerate design, implementation, and review

Resiliency, Security, and Operations
- Ensure designs account for security, redundancy, disaster recovery, data integrity, and monitoring from the outset
- Own change management discipline for your area — mission plans, Change Requests, runbooks, and rollback procedures — to support a zero major/critical incident bar
- Participate in on-call rotation and lead incident response, root-cause analysis, and postmortems for your functional area
- Drive proactive vulnerability remediation and dependency upgrades (Spring Boot, Java, Terraform modules, Helm charts) ahead of pipeline enforcement deadlines
 

Experience
- 9+ years of experience in application development
- Strong backend development and design experience with Java and Spring Boot microservices
- Experience designing and building highly scalable, distributed, cloud-native systems
- Experience modernizing legacy/brownfield systems alongside greenfield development
- Background in Agile/DevOps environments supporting large-scale enterprise implementations

Technical Skills
- Advanced Java and Spring Boot expertise; strong REST API design and microservices architecture
- Hands-on experience with GCP (GKE, Pub/Sub, BigQuery) or equivalent cloud platform
- Solid understanding of CI/CD practices and pipeline integration (GitLab CI/CD, Terraform, Helm)