Lead Software Engineer (P990)

84.51° Overview

84.51° is a retail data science, insights and media company. We help The Kroger Co., consumer packaged goods companies, agencies, publishers and affiliates create more personalized and valuable experiences for shoppers across the path to purchase.

Powered by cutting-edge science, we utilize first-party retail data from more than 62 million U.S. households sourced through the Kroger Plus loyalty card program to fuel a more customer-centric journey using 84.51° Insights, 84.51° Loyalty Marketing and our retail media advertising solution, Kroger Precision Marketing.

Join us at 84.51°!

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Lead Software Engineer (P990)

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to help lead the design and development of our public API and supporting services. This is a critical role in shaping a reliable, secure, and cloud-native platform that our clients depend on daily. You will be responsible for building an API ecosystem that is highly available, resilient, and scalable, while ensuring robust testing practices and smooth operational workflows.

You will work with technologies such as Kong (API Gateway), Azure Functions, Azure Service Bus/Queues, Azure Event Grid, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and related Azure-native services. The ideal candidate has deep experience building public APIs and designing distributed, event-driven systems in the cloud.

Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain a public-facing API that serves as the main entry point for clients.
• Define and implement API versioning strategies, migration patterns, and deprecation policies.
• Lead adoption of testing best practices including contract testing, load testing, and integration testing.
• Build and optimize CI/CD pipelines, ensuring capabilities such as blue/green deployments, feature flagging, canary releases, and rollback plans.
• Architect and implement services leveraging Azure cloud-native technologies (Functions, Service Bus, Event Grid, AKS, Storage, Monitoring).
• Design and build event-driven systems and asynchronous processing patterns.
• Ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and observability across systems.
• Provide guidance on authentication and authorization patterns for server-to-server and client integrations.
• Mentor engineers, drive architectural discussions, and champion best practices.
  
  

Qualifications

• 5 years of professional software engineering experience with a strong focus on backend development
• 2 years designing, building, and operating public APIs at scale.
• 3 years knowledge of cloud services (Azure preferred) and experience selecting the right tools for a given problem.
• 3 years’ experience with API Gateways (Kong preferred), serverless architectures, and container orchestration (AKS/Kubernetes).
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures and message queuing systems.
• Strong understanding of API testing methodologies (contract, integration, load testing).
• Deep knowledge of CI/CD practices including deployment strategies and feature flagging.
• Familiarity with OAuth2.0, PKCE, and other authentication models for server-to-server and client-server communication.
• Strong programming background (Java, Python, or Node.js preferred).
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.
  
  

Nice to Have

• Experience in retail media, adtech, or marketing platforms.
• Knowledge of monitoring/observability stacks (Datadog, Azure Monitor, etc.).
• Experience with monetized or high-throughput APIs, e.g. GraphQL based APIs.
• Background or experience working with AI/ML systems, whether applying models in production workflows or collaborating with data science teams.
• Familiarity with Model Context Protocol (MCP) or similar emerging standards for integrating AI/ML models into APIs and enterprise systems.
  
  

Pay Transparency And Benefits

• The stated salary range represents the entire span applicable across all geographic markets from lowest to highest. Actual salary offers will be determined by multiple factors including but not limited to geographic location, relevant experience, knowledge, skills, other job-related qualifications, and alignment with market data and cost of labor. In addition to salary, this position is also eligible for variable compensation.
• Below is a list of some of the benefits we offer our associates:
• Health: Medical: with competitive plan designs and support for self-care, wellness and mental health. Dental: with in-network and out-of-network benefit. Vision: with in-network and out-of-network benefit.
• Wealth: 401(k) with Roth option and matching contribution. Health Savings Account with matching contribution (requires participation in qualifying medical plan). AD&D and supplemental insurance options to help ensure additional protection for you.
• Happiness: Paid time off with flexibility to meet your life needs, including 5 weeks of vacation time, 7 health and wellness days, 3 floating holidays, as well as 6 company-paid holidays per year. Paid leave for maternity, paternity and family care instances.
  

Pay Range

$121,000—$201,250 USD