Lead Systems Engineer

Job Description

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.

Responsibilities

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) ahea...