Job Description

About Advance Auto Parts
Founded in Roanoke, VA in 1932, Advance Auto Parts is a leading automotive aftermarket retail parts provider that serves both professional installer and do-it-yourself Customers. As of July 13, 2019, Advance operated 4,912 stores and 150 Worldpac branches in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Company also serves 1,250 independently owned CARQUEST branded stores across these locations in addition to Mexico, the Bahamas, Turks, and Caicos and the British Virgin Islands. The company has a workforce of over 70,000 knowledgeable and experienced Team Members who are proud to provide outstanding service to their Customers, Communities, and each other every day.

About Advance India Innovation Center (AIIC):
We are continually innovating and seeking to elevate the Customer experience at each of our stores. For an organization of our size and reach, today, it has become more critical than ever, to identify synergies and build shared capabilities. The Advance India Innovation Center (AIIC), located in Hyderabad, is a step in this strategic direction that enables us to access a larger talent pool, unlock operational efficiencies and increase levels of collaboration.

WHO WE ARE

Come join our Technology Team and start reimagining the future of the automotive aftermarket. We are a highly motivated tech-focused organization, excited to be in the midst of dynamic innovation and transformational change. Driven by Advance’s top-down commitment to empowering our team members, we are focused on delighting our Customers with Care and Speed, through delivery of world class technology solutions and products. We value and cultivate our culture by seeking to always be collaborative, intellectually curious, fun, open, and diverse.   You will be a key member of a growing and passionate group focused on collaborating across business and technology resources to drive forward key programs and projects building enterprise capabilities across Advance Auto Parts.

Overview

We are seeking a Principal Engineer to lead the architecture, modernization, and scalability of enterprise platforms powering Compute Services, Search & Discovery, Managed File Transfer (MFT), Data Integration, Streaming Pipelines, and AI-driven capabilities. This is a highly visible, hands-on technical leadership role responsible for defining platform strategy, establishing engineering best practices, and driving innovation across mission-critical systems.

The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, event-driven platforms, large-scale data processing, and modern AI technologies, with a proven track record of building resilient, secure, and highly scalable enterprise solutions. You will partner across Engineering, Product, Infrastructure, and Business teams to build next-generation platforms that enable business growth, operational excellence, and exceptional customer experiences.

Key Areas of Focus

• Enterprise Platform Engineering

• Compute & Cloud-Native Platforms (GCP, Kubernetes)

• Search & Discovery Platforms (Vertex AI Retail Search, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch)

• Managed File Transfer (MFT) & Enterprise Integrations

• Event-Driven Architecture & Streaming Systems (Kafka, Pub/Sub)

• Large-Scale Data Integration & Processing Pipelines

• Generative AI, RAG, Agentic AI & Intelligent Automation

• Platform Reliability, Observability, Security & Automation

Responsibilities

• Define and drive the technical vision, architecture, and engineering standards for enterprise-scale platform services.

• Design and build highly scalable, resilient, secure, and cloud-native distributed systems.

• Lead the architecture and evolution of Search, Discovery, Compute, MFT, and Data Integration platforms.

• Build event-driven and real-time streaming solutions leveraging Kafka, Pub/Sub, Dataflow, Flink, and Beam.

• Drive adoption of AI/GenAI technologies, including RAG, Vector Search, AI Agents, and LLM-powered capabilities.

• Establish platform reliability practices through observability, monitoring, SRE principles, and automation.

• Champion engineering excellence, architecture governance, system resiliency, and performance optimization.

• Influence technology decisions across multiple teams and business domains.

• Partner with Product, Engineering, Architecture, Security, and Infrastructure teams to deliver strategic platform initiatives.

• Mentor senior engineers and cultivate a culture of innovation, ownership, and technical excellence.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years in senior technical leadership roles.

• Strong expertise in Java (11+/17+), Spring Boot, Microservices, and Cloud-Native Architecture.

• Deep experience designing and building distributed systems, streaming applications, and event-driven platforms.

• Hands-on experience with Kafka, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Storage, Kubernetes (GKE), Docker, and Terraform.

• Experience building enterprise Search platforms using Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Vertex AI Retail Search, or similar technologies.

• Strong understanding of resiliency patterns including circuit breakers, retries, caching, rate limiting, idempotency, and eventual consistency.

• Experience with observability platforms including Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, ELK, and distributed tracing.

• Knowledge of Managed File Transfer technologies including SFTP, FTPS, SMB, API-based integrations, and secure file exchange platforms.

• Experience with Generative AI technologies including LLM integration, RAG architectures, Vector Databases, AI Agents, and intelligent automation frameworks.

What Success Looks Like

• Architects and delivers scalable enterprise platforms that support current and future business growth.

• Drives platform reliability, security, performance, and operational excellence at scale.

• Influences engineering strategy and technical direction across multiple organizations.

• Accelerates innovation through cloud-native technologies, automation, and AI adoption.

• Develops and mentors high-performing engineering teams while raising the technical bar across the organization.

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