Lead Software Engineer - Forward Deployed Engineering, ITC

Overview

Lead the technical direction and execution of Nike's Demand Planning and Pricing (DPP) platform capabilities as a technical leader for your squad, guiding and mentoring engineers while working across teams to deliver scalable platform capabilities.

What you'll do

• Own and drive the technical roadmap for your domain in partnership with Product and Architecture.
• Translate complex business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Lead architectural design decisions and technical reviews across systems.
• Design and build highly scalable backend systems and microservices using Java, Spring Boot, and cloud-native patterns.
• Develop robust data-driven RESTful APIs and event-driven services for enterprise-scale platforms.
• Build resilient distributed systems leveraging messaging platforms such as Kafka or similar.
• Design and implement data pipelines and integrations across systems and platforms.
• Work with modern data platforms (e.g., Spark, Databricks, Delta Lake or equivalent) where required.
• Contribute to data quality, consistency, and availability across services.
• Strategize and design ontology-based explainable systems that can drive decisions and insights at high accuracy.
• Lead development and deployment of services on cloud platforms (AWS preferred), ensuring scalability and efficiency.
• Drive adoption of CI/CD pipelines, observability, and DevOps best practices.
• Establish and enforce high standards in coding, testing, and system reliability.
• Continuously improve system performance and scalability.
• Promote modern engineering practices and platform-first thinking.
• Mentor engineers across levels and foster a strong engineering culture.
• Partner with Business, Product and Engineering leaders to align priorities and execution.
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Copilot, code assistants) to improve coding efficiency, testing, and documentation.
• Identify opportunities to apply AI/GenAI capabilities to enhance system workflows, automation, and user experiences.
• Contribute to establishing best practices for responsible AI usage, ensuring security, data privacy, and reliability.
• Balance AI usage with strong engineering fundamentals, system design, and code quality standards.

What you'll need

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• 8 - 12 years of experience building scalable backend systems.
• 2+ years in a technical leadership role, guiding teams and driving architecture decisions.
• Domain expertise in implementing solutions for retail apparel industry specific demand planning, forecasting, and pricing capabilities.
• Strong expertise in full-stack software development and systems architecture.
• Proven experience designing and operating large-scale distributed systems including API design, integration and microservices, database systems and data modeling, security, compliance and data privacy.
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architecture and messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ, or similar).
• Exposure to data engineering ecosystems (Spark, Databricks, or similar).
• Strong fundamentals in SQL and data modelling.
• Understanding of batch and real-time data processing patterns.
• Exposure to frontend technologies such as React or Angular.
• Experience working on enterprise-scale platforms and integrations.
• Familiarity with distributed systems and external service integrations.
• Solid experience with cloud infrastructure and deployment patterns (AWS preferred) and cloud-native design principles.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and DevOps practices.
• Strong ability to mentor and influence engineering teams.
• Proven experience driving technical roadmaps and cross-team alignment.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with ability to work directly with business users.
• Ability to adapt and operate effectively in a continuously changing, fast-paced, ambiguous environment.
• Bring a strong mindset of Forward Deployment Engineer to implement and deliver at speed and scale.

Details

• Location: Karnataka, India.
• Part of Nike's Supply Chain and Planning Technology (SCPT) organization; reports to a Sr. Engineering Manager.