Cost & Pricing Staff Software Engineer

Responsibilities

Job Summary

As a Staff Software Engineer, you'll provide technical leadership across H-E-B Digital's Cost & Pricing portfolio, partnering with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, and Tech Leads to drive architecture, modernization, and delivery outcomes. You'll help define technical strategy, simplify complex systems, influence cross-team decisions, and establish scalable solutions that support Cost Optimization, Core Business Modernization, and Pricing modernization initiatives.

Key Responsibilities & Essential Functions

Area of Focus

• Provides technical and architectural leadership across multiple Cost & Pricing services, domains, and platforms, helping guide modernization efforts, portfolio-level initiatives, and cross-team engineering decisions.
• Steps into squad-level work when necessary to lead complex initiatives, unblock teams, and ensure successful delivery of critical business objectives.
• Establishes technical standards across multiple teams, influences engineering strategy, and owns initiatives spanning Cost, Pricing, Core Services, and modernization efforts. Actively develops engineering talent through mentoring, coaching, and technical leadership.

Work Breakdown

• Reviews epics and initiatives critically and ensures they're appropriately broken down and prioritized with cross-team dependencies identified.

Priority and Dependencies

• Ensures cross-team dependencies are identified and well understood by all teams involved and other relevant stakeholders.
• Works across teams (including non-technical teams) to foster a culture of priority setting and urgency in alignment with organizational strategy.

Dealing with Ambiguity

• Owns risk, change, and uncertainty across multiple teams.
• Ability to proactively identify ambiguity and drive teams towards mitigating potential issues.
• Considers how ambiguity in their team's work might affect, or be affected by, the work of other teams.
• Works on technology projects/tasks with no guidance.
• Mentors other engineers in making decisions under uncertainty.

Reliability and Accountability

• Manages cross-team commitments, their progress, and roadmap to delivery. Anticipates and communicates blockers, delays, and scope increases across teams before they require escalation.
• Ensures expectations across teams and stakeholders are clarified between all parties involved.

Architecture, Coding and Testing

• Understands the architecture, integration landscape, and modernization strategy across Cost and Pricing platforms, Core Services, enterprise integrations, and data ecosystems.
• Writes production-ready code and tests that meet acceptance criteria, are easily testable, documented, easily understood by other developers, and account for edge cases, security, and errors.
• Understands adjacent domains and the design and integration landscape of multiple H-E-B systems or services as they affect their team.
• Expert understanding of software design, architecture, security, scalability, reliability, and performance and capable of architecting and designing at the portfolio, domain, or end-to-end solution level.
• Introduces new technologies that have ROI/influence. Stays ahead of technology trends and evolution with an eye toward long-term sustainability and growth of existing and new systems/services.
• Supports engineers in optimizing production-ready code.
• Designs, develops, tests, and deploys software.
• Able to lead strategically important projects involving multiple teams.
• Aligns teams toward simple, effective designs.
• Provides technical leadership for modernization initiatives including legacy retirement, Core Service adoption, enterprise integration simplification, and cloud-native platform development.
• Defines and champions consistent technology standards — including language choices, frameworks, and architectural patterns — that reduce friction for engineers moving between Digital teams.

Application Support and Health

• Leads production support, on-call, debugging, and troubleshooting of issues impacting multiple teams and services.
• Drives adoption of system health based on Site Reliability Engineering best practices.
• Enacts changes to team monitoring practices that improve system and team health.

Effective Communication and Knowledge Sharing

• Creates documentation and training related to technology stacks, standards, and systems/services across multiple teams.
• Provides constructive criticism to stakeholders across the organization.
• Effectively communicates technical strategy, architecture decisions, modernization roadmaps, and delivery tradeoffs to engineering teams, product partners, and senior leadership.

Teamwork and Collaboration

• Helps to break down barriers across teams.
• Looks for opportunities to share learnings and learn from others.
• Seeks to improve communication and collaboration between teams by building relationships and finding common ground.
• Partners closely with Product, Engineering, Data, Accounting, Procurement, and enterprise platform teams to align technical decisions with business objectives and modernization goals.

The responsibilities and essential functions outlined above describe the general nature and level of work assigned to this position. This is not an exhaustive list of all duties, responsibilities, and skills required. Duties and responsibilities may be modified at any time based on business needs. Employees may be required to perform other job-related tasks as requested by their supervisor, subject to reasonable accommodations.

Qualifications & Key Requirements

Work Experience

• 7+ years of experience in software development.
• Experience with common software engineering tools (e.g., Git, Jira, Confluence).
• Extensive experience successfully producing consistent, high-quality results.
• Expert knowledge of Computer Science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, design patterns, system architecture, and software design.
• Expert understanding of the full SDLC and frameworks (Agile, Scrum, Kanban, etc.).
• Experience writing unit tests and testable code.

Knowledge / Skills / Abilities

• Expert knowledge of modern application development technologies and architectures, including Java, Angular, GraphQL, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, service-oriented architectures, event-driven systems, and cloud-native platforms.
• Expert knowledge in system and data architecture, data modeling, and design and capable of architecting and designing at the application, domain, or portfolio level using well-accepted design patterns.
• Ability to review platform designs for strength of engineering solutions, namely performance, sustainability, and iterative development potential.
• Expert knowledge of Computer Science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, design patterns, system architecture, and software design.
• Expert understanding of the full SDLC and frameworks (Agile, Scrum, Kanban, etc.).
• Experience designing and supporting enterprise-scale APIs, distributed systems, service-oriented architectures, and event-driven applications.
• Experience leading architecture and modernization efforts involving legacy system retirement, platform consolidation, and Core Service adoption.
• Recommends and drives changes to processes and tools across teams at the group/department level based on industry standards, patterns, and best practices.
• Approaches problem-solving holistically and considers solutions through a combination of technology and process.
• Identifies best approaches to improve technical solutions to complex problems and effectively proposes paths forward to drive outcomes.
• Ability to influence technical direction across multiple teams and align engineering investments to business outcomes.
• Capable of leading large initiatives with multiple engineers including design, architecture, and delivery of complex features across multiple systems/services.

Education

• A Computer Science degree or comparable formal training, certification, or work experience.

Licenses / Certifications

Physical Demands & Working Conditions

• Travel by car or plane with overnight stays.
• Work extended hours; sit for extended periods.
• Work rotating and on-call schedules, as needed.

The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those a Partner encounters while performing the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Last revised: 11/01/2024