Principal Software Engineer, ITC

WHO YOU'LL WORK WITH

You will report to the Senior Director of Engineering and serve as the most senior individual contributor in the organization. You will drive the next generation of Marketing data platforms, analytics engineering, AI-enabled insights, measurement frameworks, and data products that power critical business functions across Paid Media, Owned Marketing, Consumer Engagement, Content Supply Chain, AdTech, CDP, and Marketplace Insights. The successful candidate will serve as a technical leader and trusted partner to engineering, product, data science, analytics, and business stakeholders globally. You will be a technical force multiplier — your decisions influence dozens of teams and millions of dollars of Global Technology.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We are looking for a hands-on technical leader with deep systems intuition, strong opinions held loosely, and a proven record of driving enterprise-wide outcomes.

• A minimum of 10+ years of software and data engineering experience, including time as a senior or lead IC at a large-scale data-driven company.
• Mastery of multiple backend languages (Java, Python, Scala) and deep expertise in distributed systems, data modeling, and API design.
• Architect-level fluency with modern data platforms — Analytics, Databricks, Spark, Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Iceberg, Trino, dbt, or equivalents — and with streaming systems (Kafka, Flink).
• Proven experience designing enterprise consumption layers — semantic/ontology layers, governed APIs, metric stores, agentic/LLM-powered analytics surfaces.
• Strong cloud architecture expertise across AWS, GCP, or Azure: security, cost, resilience, multi-region.
• A track record of driving large-scale simplifications, decommissions, and migrations across many teams.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical strategy, write influential design documents, and align senior leaders.
• Experience partnering with Platform, Security, and Governance organizations to shape enterprise standards.
• Exceptional written and verbal communication; equally comfortable in deep-code reviews and exec briefings.
• Bachelor's or advanced degree in Computer Science or related field — or equivalent experience.
• Preferred: published technical writing, open-source contributions, prior experience leading data-product platforms at retail / commerce / consumer scale.

WHAT YOU'LL WORK ON

As a Principal Software Engineer, you will shape the long-term technical direction of Marketing Data Foundation and BI.

• You will define the multi-year architecture for our governed consumption layers — APIs, ontology/semantic models, agentic layers, and data quality systems.
• You will drive a single source of truth for Nike Marketing analytics and insight data across the enterprise, in partnership with BI Experience teams.
• You will lead the aggressive simplification and unification of our data products landscape — picking which systems live, which get decommissioned, and how teams migrate safely.
• You will co-design with BI Experience teams the agentic and AI-powered consumption experiences that change how business users discover health, insights, and actions.
• You will set engineering standards (testing, observability, security, performance) and ensure they are adopted consistently across the org's repos.
• You will influence the Platform team's toolkit, blueprints, and patterns to make sure they serve Marketplace data use cases at scale.
• You will mentor Leads and Senior engineers across multiple squads, and represent the organization in cross-Nike architecture and governance forums.
• You will write and ship code on the highest-leverage problems — staying close enough to the keyboard to make decisions credibly.