Director, Software Engineering, Nike Platform, ITC

WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH

Nike Platform Engine (NPE) provides solutions to standardize the way that Nike engineering teams deploy software to the cloud. The north star of NPE is to provide a set of cohesive managed services that orchestrate across Nike and Cloud Provider offerings to abstract the latest container, serverless, and cloud technologies. This allows NIKE Digital Athletes to build, deliver, monitor, and scale platforms faster and with a lower ongoing effort without having to concern themselves with the undifferentiated infrastructure and automation engineering.

You will support engineering team activities focused on designing, developing, onboarding and supporting customers to Nike’s Global Technology Developer Platforms. You will evaluate research and development projects results to assure accomplishment of technical objectives. You will track and report on team work outcomes and make recommendations for actions necessary to achieve desired results. You will hire and chose personnel to ensure the efficient team operation. You will closely collaborate with Principal Engineers, Product Managers and other Platform Directors.

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We are looking for an experienced and passionate Software Engineering Director to lead a team focused on building and operating foundational platforms for Nike’s developer ecosystem. You bring strong technical depth in cloud-native platforms, combined with proven people leadership experience. You excel at mentoring engineers, driving execution, and delivering high-quality platform capabilities at scale. You are comfortable navigating complex organizational environments, collaborating across functions, and ensuring teams are aligned to deliver measurable outcomes. You foster an inclusive, empowered team culture while balancing delivery, innovation, and operational excellence.

Key Skill Required:
 

• A proven track record with a combined 15 years of experience in both software development as an individual contributor and technical people leadership with experience in building or leading teams operating managed services solutions with large user bases
• Comprehensive understanding of two or more of the following domains:
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings
  • Containers and container orchestration systems including Kubernetes and container-based CI/CD stacks and ideally GitOps
  • Experience with DNS service discovery
  • Familiarity with leveraging and integrating Secrets Management solutions such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, or CyberArk
• A robust understanding of modern development best practices and agile driven development with a bias towards action
• Experience in a high velocity organization such as a startup or complex global organizational environment is desired, specifically:
  • Experience working on a distributed team and leadership experience of a team that “follows the sun” is preferred
  • A focus on acquiring and retaining top talent with prioritization on the development, mentoring, culture building and empowering of your reports and peers
• Self-starter with high motivation and passion who thrives in an ever-changing, fast-paced environment with the ability to adapt to change, this implies strong leadership, confidence, and influencing skills.
• Excellent management, leadership, collaboration, mentorship, communication, problem solving, conflict resolution, and senior stakeholder relationship management skills

WHAT YOU’LL WORK ON

You will lead a team responsible for building and operating foundational platform services that power Nike’s microservices ecosystem. You will drive design, development, and adoption of platform capabilities that enable engineering teams to build, deploy, and scale applications efficiently.
Your responsibility includes:

• Lead the design, development, and operation of platform services such as Kubernetes, service mesh, and API infrastructure
• Drive onboarding and enablement of internal engineering teams to developer platforms
• Collaborate with product and program partners to define priorities and deliver roadmap commitments
• Track team outcomes, measure success, and drive continuous improvements
• Support hiring, mentoring, and performance development of engineers
• Ensure reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency of platform services
• Promote best practices in modern software development and cloud-native architecture