Lead Software Engineer - Store + Operations

Los Angeles, CA (Preference for Los Angeles, open to remote)

Reports to: Software Engineering Manager

The Job

At sweetgreen, a Lead Software Engineer is more than an architect. They are trusted squad members that heavily influence the design and implementation of new services while also integrating with and upgrading existing ones to address mission-critical problems. Working closely with Software Engineering Managers and Principals, they champion architectural decisions that facilitate the work of their teams and our business as a whole. 

Success depends on balancing their schedules to implement their designs alongside their peers as hands-on senior contributors.

Top Goal -  Within one year develop a complete system for ensuring that sweetgreen products can be produced in our stores as quickly, accurately, and efficiently as possible. This solution will include the interplay of leading quick service hardware and platforms (e.g. POS, KDS machines), custom developed and data-driven order fulfillment mechanisms, and integrations to multiple food ordering and delivery platforms. The approach needs to be implemented in a sequence of logical steps addressing major business problems as part of the process: scalability, compatibility, and incrementality. 

These are the performance objectives we expect from a Lead Engineer:

• Map the Existing System: A guest order flows through many systems before making it to our customers. In your first two weeks, you’ll have developed a deep understanding of the order lifecycle by reviewing the existing system design and documentation. By day 21, you will have contributed to those areas that need additional documentation, in both Confluence and elsewhere.
• Collaboratively Design and Evaluate Alternatives: Within 30 days, conduct a high-level end-to-end system analysis. Work with Product to understand the user needs and the S+O engineering squad to develop realistic solutions. Create technical design documents (TDDs) that propose incremental solutions and work with other Lead Engineers and Software Engineering Managers to conduct trade-off analysis with a specific focus on scalability and sustainability. 
• Present Your Solution: By 45 days in seat, you will have presented your TDD(s) to the other Lead Engineers and Software Engineering Managers for feedback for feasibility, scalability, and implications for how your solution would interface with existing systems and secure consensus to implement.
• Lead the Technical Implementation: By day 90, you will spend 50-75% of your time leading the technical production of the solutions with our team of engineers and personally building RESTful APIs for your solution. The primary focus of the technical development effort will be to assume ownership over the customer relationship platform. Your work will include presenting your own pull requests and reviewing others. In partnership with Product and Technical Program Management you’ll hold yourself accountable to the dates that you committed to, completing feature work in your first sprint. 
• Documentation: In order to ease future teammate onboarding, debugging, and knowledge sharing of complex services while mitigating the risk of tribal knowledge, within 30 days in seat, you’ll contribute to our established information architecture within Confluence and put a plan in place to realize 100% documentation of the systems you own.
• Monitoring System Health: By day 90, you will have a plan in place to implement missing or leverage existing telemetry and testing, through CI/CD, so you can report on the health of your services, triage bugs, and limit regression.
• Raise The Bar: At sweetgreen we dedicate a portion of our attention to matters that may not be immediately customer facing and instead allow for us to work smarter, or faster, or simply reduce friction in the developer experience. You’ll own your squad’s specific backlog that is focused on operational excellence.

Engineering Culture

At sweetgreen our business evolves every day as do the solutions we invent to meet those emerging needs. We believe that it’s a mix of individual skill and collaboration that leads to successful outcomes. There is no standard definition of what an Engineer is or does, and depending on where you’re coming from things might look a little different.

We’re technology agnostic, but we have a propensity to leverage lean tools that are best suited to get the job done. Our most popular choices are Node and Ruby, and are often deployed to either a severless or container orchestrated platform. Our frontend clients leverage a variety of frameworks, including React. We try not to over index on the latest tech and to instead focus on the tools that allow for the greatest development experience, quality of work, and productivity.

We value, encourage, and support diversity in backgrounds and opinions. We are human, fallible, life-long learners - we make mistakes from which we learn and grow. We partner with Product, Design, Data, IT, Operations, and Business stakeholders in long-term ownership of the solutions we build to improve the lives of our customers.

Our mission within Engineering is to create, operate, and continually improve upon software critical to the overall sweetgreen mission. We provide technical expertise, guidance, and vision to our partners and stakeholders in order to inform sustainable thinking across sweetgreen.

Our sincere vision is to be a world-class engineering organization leading the food experience revolution.

What you'll get:

• Three different medical plans to suit your and your family's needs
• Dental and Vision insurance
• Flexible PTO plan
• 401k; company match of 50% up to 3% of employee contribution
• 5 months paid family leave; we believe in fully supporting new parents
• Employee HSA and FSA
• Complimentary greens
• An opportunity to make a real impact on the people around you, both by growing them and by connecting them to real food
• To live the sweetlife and celebrate your passion + purpose
• A collaborative team of people who live our core values and have your back
• A clear career path with opportunities for development, both personally and professionally
• Free sweetgreen swag

Come join the sweetlife!

About sweetgreen

sweetgreen is on a mission to build healthier communities by connecting people to real food. We passionately believe that real food should be convenient and accessible to everyone. Every day in each sweetgreen, our 3,500 team members make food from scratch, using fresh ingredients and produce delivered that morning. And in our local communities, we’re committed to leaving people better than we found them. We’re in the business of feeding people, and we’re out to change what that means.

sweetgreen provides equal opportunities for everyone that works for us and everyone that applies to join our team, without regard to sex or gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, pregnancy, physical or mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, any service, past, present, or future, in the uniformed services of the United States (military or veteran status), or any other consideration protected by federal, state, or local law.

sweetgreen participates in the federal government's E-Verify program to determine employment eligibility. To learn more about the E-Verify program, please click here.