Lead Software Engineer, Cloud Infrastructure & Governance

About the role

Nike is hiring a Lead Software Engineer in its Cloud & Core Engineering team, which builds and operates Nike's multi-cloud platform and software-defined network. The role leads the layer covering multi-cloud access and entitlement management, account lifecycle, resource attribution, cloud governance and policy guardrails, and cloud economics including unit-cost optimization. It is a high-ownership, hands-on engineering leadership position reporting to a Software Engineering Manager, with close work alongside software engineers and partners such as Leads, Principal Engineers, Engineering Directors and Product Managers.

Key responsibilities

• Lead and grow one or two engineering squads, set technical direction and integrate cloud infrastructure solutions with partner platforms and applications.
• Drive roadmap delivery, turning capability strategy into quarterly and sprint plans, measurable OKRs and clear trade-offs with stakeholders.
• Provide day-to-day technical direction to the team accountable for cloud entitlements and governance at scale, maturing access management, RBAC and policy guardrail systems across AWS, Azure, Alibaba Cloud and GCP.
• Embed AI-native practices, championing agentic and AI-assisted engineering patterns and identifying where LLM and automation tooling can accelerate platform capabilities.
• Act as a platform owner: hold engineering standards, define SLOs, and make the management plane reliable, observable and secure.
• Bridge India-based talent and global engineering by building co-ownership partnerships with US counterparts, and feed into talent planning while building an inclusive engineering culture.

Required profile

• Minimum 9+ years of software engineering experience, focused on cloud infrastructure in a multi-cloud ecosystem, including architecture, deployment and management of enterprise cloud solutions.
• 3+ years of leadership experience leading senior engineers in a GCC or distributed engineering model.
• Experience co-owning a product or platform with a global counterpart, driving alignment on priorities, architecture and operating models without escalation dependency.
• Ability to mentor a team of cloud engineers and prior experience as a backend or platform engineer building APIs, services and developer-facing systems.
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering or an equivalent technical background.

Required skills

• Hands-on cloud infrastructure automation with Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible or CloudFormation, and infrastructure-as-code tooling such as Crossplane, Terraform, CDK or similar.
• Fluency in microservices, event-driven patterns, REST/GraphQL, API design, domain-driven design and security-by-design.
• Production-quality software in Python, Go or Java, and front-end technologies such as JavaScript, CSS, HTML5 and React.
• Experience with control-plane capabilities, orchestration, policy enforcement, entitlement workflows and resource lifecycle management.
• Cloud governance, entitlements or policy systems (IAM/RBAC, SCP/policy guardrails) at enterprise scale; AI/ML integration and AIOps exposure are advantages.
• Agile/DevOps practice with CI/CD, SLO-based operations and blameless post-mortems.
• AWS Developer or Azure equivalent certification is an added benefit.