Lead Engineer - Consumer Intelligence & Engagement

The Lead Engineer will be part of the Consumer Intelligence & Engagement organisation, which delivers intelligence and engagement capabilities that enable more relevant and personalised consumer experiences across digital channels. The organisation supports how consumers discover products, engage with content, and elevate experiences through membership and loyalty, using personalisation, recommendations, consumer intelligence, experimentation, and AI-driven decisioning. The role provides technical leadership for a team building production-grade backend services that power personalisation and recommendation capabilities.

• Lead the design and development of AI-powered product discovery, semantic search, retrieval, recommendation, and conversational commerce services.
• Own technical architecture, engineering standards, and key technology decisions across search platforms, agentic AI capabilities, and backend services.
• Design and build scalable, low-latency APIs, microservices, event-driven systems, and integration layers supporting real-time consumer experiences and commerce workflows.
• Partner with AI/ML Engineers, Data Engineers, and Product teams to develop and operationalise semantic search, retrieval, recommendation, and agentic AI capabilities.
• Design and implement retrieval pipelines, vector search solutions, embedding strategies, and AI evaluation frameworks that deliver relevant, accurate, and grounded user experiences.
• Build and integrate agentic AI solutions and LLM APIs, AI services, search platforms, and enterprise systems to support discovery, recommendations, product comparison, shopping assistance, and intelligent consumer and business experiences.
• Ensure solutions are secure, observable, reliable, resilient, and aligned with responsible AI and engineering best practices.
• Drive engineering excellence through architecture reviews, code reviews, technical mentorship, continuous improvement, and AI-assisted engineering practices, coding agents, and developer productivity tools to improve software quality and delivery effectiveness.
• Optimise performance, scalability, search relevance, reliability, and operational efficiency through experimentation, observability, and automation.
• Provide technical leadership across teams while guiding delivery partners and influencing the long-term architecture and roadmap of AI-powered commerce platforms.

• 10+ years of experience designing and building large-scale distributed backend systems on cloud-native platforms.
• 3+ years of experience leading a technical capability, platform, project, or engineering team.
• Hands-on experience building and operating semantic search, vector search, retrieval, recommendation, or product discovery platforms at scale.
• Strong understanding of modern retrieval architectures, including embeddings, vector databases, hybrid search, RAG, and relevance optimisation.
• Experience building and operationalising AI-powered applications using LLM APIs, foundation models, and agentic AI frameworks.
• Hands-on experience designing agent-based systems, tool/function calling patterns, workflow orchestration, and context management for production AI applications.
• Strong understanding of AI evaluation, observability, guardrails, monitoring, and responsible AI practices.
• Expertise in backend engineering, API design, microservices, event-driven architectures, and scalable integration patterns using Java, Spring Boot, and related frameworks.
• Experience integrating AI capabilities with enterprise platforms, product catalogues, customer data, inventory, and commerce systems.
• Experience with Redis or equivalent caching technologies.
• Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases, distributed data management, and high-throughput systems.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, cloud-native architecture, messaging platforms, and scalability patterns.
• Experience with observability, reliability engineering, performance optimisation, and production operations.
• Proven ability to drive architectural decisions, influence technical direction, and mentor engineers across teams.
• Experience using coding agents, LLMs, or AI-assisted engineering tools to improve software delivery and developer productivity.

• Experience with Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Pinecone, Weaviate, LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or similar technologies is highly desirable.
• Experience in eCommerce, retail, digital consumer products, search platforms, or personalised consumer experiences is strongly preferred.

PUMA is a global sports brand creating footwear, apparel, and accessories that inspire athletes and everyday movers. The PUMA Group owns PUMA, Cobra Golf, and stichd, operates in 120+ countries, and has around 22,000 employees worldwide. PUMA provides equal opportunities for all job applicants and does not tolerate any form of harassment or discrimination, with equality for all as one of its core principles.