Position Overview:
The Staff Engineer 6 Shop Technology is a senior individual contributor responsible for shaping the technical architecture, engineering standards, and reliability of technology solutions that power Dutch Bros shops. This role will work across the Shop Technology ecosystem, including point-of-sale, payments, labor systems, mobile and shop applications, order ahead, menu and pricing integrations, and other operational platforms. The Staff Engineer will provide hands-on technical leadership across application development, systems integration, automation, testing, deployment, monitoring, and production reliability. This is a hands-on engineering role. The Staff Engineer is expected to design complex solutions, contribute production-quality code, build proof-of-concepts, review architecture and detailed technical designs, perform code reviews, troubleshoot complex production issues, and mentor engineers while influencing technical direction across multiple Shop Technology domains. The role will partner closely with Product, Engineering, Operations, Architecture, Infrastructure, Security, Data, Technology Support, and external technology partners to translate business needs into scalable, resilient, secure, and maintainable technical solutions. The Staff Engineer will also help modernize Shop Technology by reducing manual processes and point-to-point dependencies, establishing reusable integration patterns and APIs, improving observability and operational resilience, and ensuring shop-facing systems can scale with Dutch Bros growth.
Job Qualifications:
Required Qualifications:
- Bachelor 2 or Master 2 degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field, or equivalent hands-on experience.
- 8+ years of software engineering experience, including significant experience designing and building enterprise or distributed systems.
- Proven ability to remain hands-on with software development while providing technical leadership through architecture, detailed design reviews, and code reviews.
- Strong software engineering experience with one or more modern programming languages such as Java, C#, Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, or similar.
- Strong understanding of APIs, event-driven architectures, integration patterns, messaging, databases, and distributed systems.
- Demonstrated experience designing scalable, resilient, and highly available systems supporting business-critical operations.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure and associated compute, storage, networking, monitoring, and integration services.
- Strong experience with CI/CD, automated testing, source control, and modern software engineering practices.
- Experience with observability technologies and practices, including logging, monitoring, metrics, alerting, and distributed tracing.
- Experience designing and supporting integrations between third-party SaaS platforms and internally developed applications.
- Strong understanding of production support, incident management, root-cause analysis, reliability engineering, and operational readiness.
- Demonstrated ability to simplify complex systems and reduce manual operational dependencies through automation.
- Experience working with security, identity and access management, and secure integration patterns.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical concepts to business and executive stakeholders.
- Demonstrated ability to influence technical strategy and drive cross-functional alignment without direct managerial authority.
- Experience mentoring engineers through technical design reviews, code reviews, troubleshooting, and engineering best practices.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience supporting retail, restaurant, hospitality, or other high-volume distributed-location technology environments.
- Experience with point-of-sale, payment processing, labor management, mobile applications, digital ordering, or shop/store technology.
- Experience integrating enterprise platforms with vendor-managed SaaS solutions.
- Experience with API management, event streaming, workflow automation, or master-data patterns.
- Experience working with geographically distributed systems where network resilience, offline capability, and transaction integrity are important.
- Familiarity with PCI, payment security, or other regulated technology environments is a plus.
Location Requirement: 2
This role is located in Tempe, Arizona. This position is required to be in office 4 days per week (Mon-Thurs); Fridays are optional remote work days.
Key Result Areas (KRAs):
Technical Strategy & Architecture
- Define and evolve the technical architecture for Shop Technology platforms and integrations.
- Translate business and product strategy into scalable, maintainable, resilient, and secure technical solutions.
- Establish architectural patterns that reduce tightly coupled, point-to-point integrations and promote reusable services, APIs, events, and workflows.
- Guide decisions on system boundaries, integration ownership, authoritative data sources, and appropriate use of vendor and internally developed capabilities.
- Ensure Shop Technology architecture supports continued shop growth, operational reliability, and future product capabilities.
- Develop proof-of-concepts and reference implementations to validate new technical approaches.
- Lead and participate in architecture and detailed technical design reviews.
Hands-On Engineering & Software Development
- Design and implement complex software components, integrations, APIs, and automation across the Shop Technology ecosystem.
- Contribute production-quality code on strategic and technically complex initiatives.
- Build proof-of-concepts and reference implementations for new technologies and integration approaches.
- Perform code reviews and provide actionable technical feedback to engineers.
- Review solution designs for scalability, reliability, security, maintainability, performance, and operational readiness.
- Partner directly with engineers to troubleshoot complex implementation challenges.
- Maintain hands-on involvement in engineering delivery while providing broader technical leadership.
Shop Technology Integration & Engineering
- Design and implement integrations across Shop Technology platforms, including point-of-sale, payments, labor systems, mobile/shop applications, order ahead, menu and pricing systems, and other operational technologies.
- Establish reusable API and integration patterns to reduce duplication and simplify system-to-system connectivity.
- Partner with Product Leads and business stakeholders to translate requirements into clear technical designs and implementation approaches.
- Ensure integrations provide appropriate retry, reconciliation, error handling, observability, and recovery mechanisms.
- Identify opportunities to replace manual or person-dependent processes with automated, scalable solutions.
Engineering Standards & Software Delivery
- Establish and champion engineering standards for coding, APIs, integrations, testing, deployment, documentation, and supportability.
- Lead and participate in architecture reviews, detailed design reviews, and code reviews.
- Promote automated unit, integration, regression, and end-to-end testing.
- Improve CI/CD practices and reduce risk associated with releases and production change.
- Ensure technical solutions meet requirements for scalability, maintainability, performance, security, and supportability.
- Promote reusable engineering patterns and reduce unnecessary custom or one-off implementations.
Reliability, Observability & Production Engineering
- Establish monitoring, logging, metrics, alerting, tracing, and operational dashboards for critical Shop Technology systems.
- Define operational readiness requirements before new solutions are released into production.
- Partner with Technology Support, Infrastructure, vendors, and engineering teams during major incidents and complex production issues.
- Lead technical root-cause analysis and ensure corrective actions address underlying causes rather than symptoms.
- Identify and eliminate recurring operational issues through engineering and automation.
- Define resilience patterns for network interruptions, downstream-system failures, retries, offline scenarios, and transaction recovery.
- Help establish meaningful availability, performance, reliability, and recovery objectives for critical shop systems.
Automation & Technical Simplification
- Identify manual processes, repetitive operational tasks, and fragile dependencies that can be eliminated through automation.
- Develop automation and engineering solutions that reduce operational workload and improve consistency.
- Simplify legacy integrations and reduce inappropriate dependencies between Shop Technology platforms.
- Partner with Product and Operations teams to identify opportunities where engineering investment can materially improve shop operations.
- Promote workflow-driven solutions and appropriate authoritative-source patterns rather than embedding business ownership into transactional platforms.
Vendor & Platform Engineering
- Provide technical leadership in engagements with Shop Technology vendors and implementation partners.
- Review vendor architecture, APIs, integration capabilities, scalability, reliability, and security.
- Challenge vendor solutions where needed and ensure technical decisions align with Dutch Bros architecture and operational requirements.
- Partner with vendors on complex defects, production issues, technical roadmap discussions, and platform improvements.
