The Cloud & Core Engineering team builds, operates, and provides full lifecycle management of Nike's fully managed, multi-cloud platform and software-defined network, the foundation that enables self-service cloud, data, and AI environments for Nike Global Technology. Cloud and Core Engineering team is part of Foundational Services, AI & Security Technology domain. You will be reporting to Software Engineering Manager. You will spend much of your time with Software Engineers in Cloud Engineering and adjacent teams. You will also partner closely with other Leads, Principal Engineers, Engineering Directors, and Product Managers in both foundational and business facing technology domains.
We are looking for a lead software engineer to lead the layer responsible for multi-cloud access and entitlement management, account lifecycle, resource attribution, cloud governance and policy guardrails, and cloud economics including unit-cost optimization. This is a high- ownership, high-visibility, hands on engineering leadership role, not a coordination role. The ideal candidate will be a strong analytical problem solver, bringing deep technical expertise in Cloud Engineering to solve complex engineering problems to enable Nike’s pursuit to deliver State of the art Enterprise Cloud infrastructure to run Nike’s business and support our athletes.
Minimum 9+ years of experience in software engineering, with a focus on cloud infrastructure engineering in a multi cloud ecosystem including architecture, deployment and management of enterprise cloud solutions.
3+ years of leadership experience including leading senior engineers and engineers in a GCC or distributed engineering model.
Experience co-owning a product or platform with a global counterpart, driving alignment on priorities, architectural decisions, and operating models without escalation dependency.
Ability to mentor and guide a team of cloud engineers.
Strong grasp of software engineering fundamentals including system design, testing, maintainable code, API design, and scalability.
Ability to go deep in architecture and code reviews, challenge technical decisions credibly, and raise the engineering bar through firsthand engineering experience.
Hands-on experience in cloud infrastructure automation using tools like Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, or CloudFormation Prior experience as a backend or platform engineer building APIs, services, workflows, and developer-facing systems not just managing infrastructure or vendor tools.
Experience building control plane or platform capabilities as software products, including Orchestration, policy enforcement, entitlement workflows, and resource lifecycle
Management. Fluency in modern software architecture: microservices, event-driven patterns, REST/GraphQL, API design, domain-driven design, and security-by-design at the platform layer.
Strong coding background with the ability to design, review, and debug production- quality software in Python, Go, or Java.
Experience with front-end web application technologies (JavaScript, CSS, html5, React, other UI Frameworks etc.)
Experience with implementing and integrating AI, Machine Learning to accelerate automation.
Hands-on with infrastructure-as-code and control-plane tooling, Crossplane, Terraform, CDK, or similar
Strong written and verbal communication across audiences
Agile / DevOps practitioner experience running squads with CI/CD, SLO-based operations, and blameless post-mortems as standard practice, not aspirational goals.
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a demonstrably equivalent technical background.
AWS Developer or Azure equivalent certification will be and added benefit.
Prior experience with cloud governance, entitlements, or policy systems - IAM/RBAC design, SCP/policy guardrails or similar at enterprise scale
Exposure to AI-assisted platform operations - AIOps or intelligent policy enforcement
Lead and grow One/ Two engineering squads, set technical direction, design, develop, operate, and integrate Nikes Cloud Infra Engineering solutions and integrate with partner platforms and applications.
Drive roadmap delivery, translating capability strategy into quarterly/ Sprint plans, measurable OKRs, and clear trade-off decisions with stakeholders.
Day to day provide technical direction to the team who is accountable for cloud entitlements and governance at scale: mature the access management, RBAC, and policy guardrail systems that govern Nike's multi-cloud footprint across AWS, Azure, Ali cloud and GCP.
Embed AI-native practices: champion agentic and AI-assisted engineering patterns across your squads; identify where LLM and automation tooling can accelerate platform capabilities, not just developer productivity
Operate as a platform owner, not just a Lead Software engineer: hold engineering standards, define SLOs, drive operational excellence, and ensure the Management Plane is reliable, observable, and secure.
Bridge India based talent and global engineering: build tight co-ownership partnerships with US-based counterparts, ensuring the Bangalore team is a first-class engineering hub, focus on value delivery & engineering excellence.
Feed into talent planning, and build a high-performance, inclusive engineering culture within the team and Organization.
