Distinguished Engineer - GaME (Geographies & Marketplace Experiences)

Nike is seeking a Distinguished Engineer to help define the future of its global marketplace and digital consumer ecosystem. The role shapes the technical strategy behind consumer experiences including Nike App, SNKRS, Nike.com, marketplace capabilities, partner experiences, personalisation platforms, commerce services, and emerging AI-driven shopping experiences. As one of the most senior technical leaders within GaME, the individual operates as a force multiplier across engineering organisations, influencing architecture, technology strategy, product innovation, platform modernisation, AI adoption, and operational excellence.

• Define and drive the long-term technology vision for GaME, partnering with VP Engineering, Product, Design, and Architecture leaders to establish a multi-year technology roadmap.
• Influence architectural decisions across multiple portfolios and domains, lead cross-functional technical initiatives spanning teams, products, and platforms, and serve as a trusted advisor to senior executives on emerging technology trends and investments.
• Lead the architecture and adoption of AI capabilities across Nike's digital ecosystem, defining patterns for recommendation engines, personalisation, search, conversational commerce, shopper assistants, content generation, and agentic experiences.
• Establish best practices for responsible AI, model lifecycle management, prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and AI observability, and drive integration of GenAI and agent technologies into consumer experiences, developer tooling, and operational workflows.
• Help position Nike products and services to thrive within emerging AI shopping ecosystems, and shape the future architecture of Nike App, SNKRS, Nike.com, and marketplace platforms.
• Drive scalable patterns supporting direct-to-consumer, partner, wholesale, and future marketplace business models, and design highly scalable systems supporting global launches, hype events, promotions, inventory visibility, and transactional workloads.
• Simplify the overall architecture landscape while enabling rapid product innovation, own technical strategy around cloud efficiency and FinOps practices, drive architectural decisions that optimise cloud spend without sacrificing reliability, security, or customer experience
• Identify opportunities to eliminate waste, reduce infrastructure costs, improve utilisation, and simplify operations, and establish engineering standards for performance optimisation, workload efficiency, and sustainable scaling.
• Partner with platform teams to ensure technology investments generate measurable business value, lead adoption of AI-assisted software development practices across GaME, improve developer productivity through automation, intelligent tooling, and platform engineering
• And drive transformation of SDLC processes through AI-powered coding, testing, quality assurance, and operational workflows.
• Eliminate friction within the engineering ecosystem and accelerate delivery velocity without compromising quality, establish engineering standards across architecture, security, resilience, and observability, and drive reliability improvements for mission-critical consumer experiences.
• Champion modern engineering practices including platform engineering, event-driven architectures, cloud-native development, and site reliability engineering, lead technical reviews of the most complex architectural challenges across the portfolio, help teams solve large-scale performance
• Scalability, and reliability issues, stay at the forefront of AI, cloud computing, digital commerce, and platform architecture trends, evaluate emerging technologies to determine competitive advantages for Nike, represent Nike within technical communities, conferences, and industry forums
• And build and cultivate relationships across the Distinguished Engineer and Principal Engineer communities.

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Engineering or related field; will accept any suitable combination of education, experience and training.
• 15+ years of software engineering experience with significant hands-on technical leadership.
• Recognised technical authority within a large-scale technology organisation.
• Proven success driving architecture across multiple complex products and platforms.
• Experience operating at internet-scale consumer workloads.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, event-driven architectures and cloud-native design.
• Strong knowledge of modern public cloud technologies and platform engineering practices.
• Demonstrated success leading large-scale architecture modernisation efforts.
• Experience driving measurable improvements in reliability, scalability, performance and engineering productivity.
• Significant experience designing and delivering AI/ML powered applications and platforms.
• Experience with GenAI, LLM integration, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), agent architectures and AI platform capabilities.
• Understanding of AI governance, model observability, evaluation frameworks and responsible AI principles.
• Experience applying AI to both customer experiences and internal engineering productivity.
• Strong business acumen and ability to connect technical investments to measurable business outcomes.
• Exceptional communication and influence skills.

• Experience with digital commerce, marketplaces or retail technology.
• Experience scaling global consumer-facing applications serving millions of users.
• Expertise in cloud cost optimisation and FinOps practices.
• Experience with experimentation platforms, recommendation systems, personalisation engines or search technologies.
• Active participation in technical communities, open-source initiatives or industry thought leadership.