Lead Engineer - Consumer Intelligence & Engagement

SPEED & SPIRIT is what we look for in our candidates, defined by some simple values that inspire us to BE DRIVEN in our performance, BE VIBRANT in our sporting legacy, BE TOGETHER in our team spirit, and to let our individual talent and experience shine. Applying for a job at PUMA is easy.

Simply click APPLY ONLINE and follow the steps to upload your application.

YOUR MISSION

About the Organisation & Role:

You will be part of the Consumer Intelligence & Engagement organisation responsible for delivering the intelligence and engagement capabilities that enable more relevant and personalised consumer experiences across digital channels. The organisation plays a key role in how consumers discover products, engage with content, and elevate experiences through membership & loyalty. Through capabilities such as personalisation, recommendations, consumer intelligence, experimentation, and AI-driven decisioning, the organisation helps deliver more contextual, data-driven interactions across the consumer journey.

As a Lead Engineer, you will provide technical leadership for the team building production grade backend services that power personalisation and recommendation capabilities. You will own technical architecture, engineering standards and key technology decisions, ensuring solutions are scalable, reliable, and resilient. Working closely with the Engineering Manager, Product Owners, and Data Engineering teams, you will deliver low latency services that support real-time consumer experiences. You will champion engineering best practices, code quality, observability, and continuous improvement across the team.

What you will do:

• 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 that leverage enterprise data, business services, and commerce APIs to support discovery, recommendations, product comparison, and shopping assistance.
• Integrate LLM APIs, AI services, search platforms, and enterprise systems to enable 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, and continuous improvement.
• Optimise performance, scalability, search relevance, reliability, and operational efficiency through experimentation, observability, and automation.
• Leverage AI-assisted engineering practices, coding agents, and developer productivity tools to improve software quality and delivery effectiveness.
• Provide technical leadership across teams while guiding delivery partners and influencing the long-term architecture and roadmap of AI-powered commerce platforms.

YOUR TALENT

• 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 with Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, Pinecone, Weaviate, LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, or similar technologies is highly desirable.
• Experience using coding agents, LLMs, or AI-assisted engineering tools to improve software delivery and developer productivity.
• Experience in eCommerce, retail, digital consumer products, search platforms, or personalised consumer experiences is strongly preferred.

PUMA provides equal opportunities for all job applicants, regardless of race, color, religion, national origin, sex,

gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or disability. Equality for all is one of the core principles at

PUMA and we do not tolerate any form of harassment or discrimination.

At PUMA, every application is reviewed by real people who are committed to fairness, transparency, and equal

opportunity - no matter your background, identity, or experience.To ensure our process stays true to these values, no automated systems or AI tools are used to make hiring decisions. Every decision is made by real people -with real judgment and accountability. We may use functions supported by Artificial Intelligence (AI) to carry out isolated organizational steps, such as scheduling interviews. These functions have no influence on decisions in the application process. We believe in creating spaces where everyone is welcome, celebrated, and empowered to contribute authentically. Because at PUMA, whoever wants to play, can play.

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.