Staff Engineer

Our Acquisition team is looking for a Staff Engineer. 

Context and challenges

At Decathlon, the Acquisition team is the gateway to our global e-commerce ecosystem. Its role is to attract, convert and guide millions of users every day, around the world, towards our products, our advice and our physical stores.

To support this ambition, we are tackling engineering challenges of critical scale:

• Global Visibility & Discoverability: modernise our SEO/GEO infrastructure at scale, decommission our legacy systems and ensure optimal indexing of millions of pages.

• Data distribution at scale: syndicate reliable product and store data feeds in real time to our marketing partners, marketplaces and third-party engines.

• Webperf Excellence & User Experience: maintain web performance standards without compromise (Core Web Vitals, server latency, rendering optimisation) in support of conversion rates and search ranking.

• Reliability & Measurement: ensure impeccable governance of event tracking and create seamless bridges between our editorial content (sports advice) and the e-commerce purchase journey.

As Staff Engineer Acquisition, you embody our motto: "I will choose the best hill to climb, pack my bag, then help others do the same." You act as a cross-functional technical authority, capable of steering strategic architecture decisions, raising the level of excellence across our teams and carrying a sustainable technical vision, from build through to run.

Technical environment

• Frontend & Rendering: React, Next.js (SSR, ISR, Edge rendering), TypeScript, Tailwind CSS / Design Systems

• Backend & Microservices: Node.js, TypeScript, REST & GraphQL APIs

• Streaming & Events: Apache Kafka (event-driven architecture, real-time flows)

• Cloud & Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Kubernetes (GKE), CDN (Cloudflare / Fastly), Serverless / Cloud Functions

• Databases & Caching: PostgreSQL, Redis, ClickHouse / BigQuery

• Observability & Performance: Grafana, Datadog / New Relic, Webperf audit tools (Lighthouse, CrUX, RUM), real-time alerting

• Engineering culture: You build it, you test it, you secure it, you run it. GitOps approach, automated CI/CD, end-to-end testing and security by design.

Scope of role

Embedded in the Acquisition team, your remit goes beyond a single product team: you work directly with the feature teams while guiding cross-functional initiatives and technology alignment.

1. Technical Vision & Cross-Functional Architecture

• Data syndication: design the export pipelines for product and stock data to third-party platforms, marketplaces and paid acquisition partners (high throughput, data freshness, resilience).

• Technical SEO & GEO: orchestrate the migration architecture of our legacy SEO infrastructure to modern foundations (crawl budget management, global redirect strategy, metadata standardisation, structured data).

• Store Pages (Local Commerce): lay the technical foundations for managing store pages internationally, build the Single Source of Truth (SSOT) for point-of-sale data and oversee their synchronisation with third-party platforms (Google My Business, etc.).

• Content & E-Commerce (Blog): design the technical integration and architectural linking between our editorial sports advice platform and the e-commerce purchase funnel.

• Webperformance & FinOps/Latency: define global standards for loading speed, optimise caching and storage strategies, track technical debt and audit server request chains to eliminate unnecessary latency.

• Event Tracking & Analytics: stabilise and future-proof the client-side and server-side event collection architecture, ensuring a frictionless experience for the user and absolute data integrity.

2. Engineering Leadership & Sharing of Practices

• Embody and promote the "You build it, you test it, you secure it, you run it" mindset: make security, performance and testability non-negotiable prerequisites.

• Challenge and validate architecture decisions (RFCs, ADRs) within the team and align our practices with Decathlon's global engineering standards.

• Run POCs on emerging technologies to inform the short and medium-term strategic direction.

• Proactively identify cross-team technical blockers and work with the various groups to resolve them.

Profile sought

• Experience & Scope:

  • A solid background as a senior backend or full-stack engineer, with a successful transition into a cross-functional technical leadership role (Lead Developer, Principal or Staff Engineer).

  • Proven experience on very high-traffic international e-commerce ecosystems, subject to strong volume and discoverability constraints.

• Technical Expertise:

  • In-depth mastery of modern web architectures (Next.js / React) and microservices (Node.js / TypeScript).

  • Mastery of event-driven architectures (Apache Kafka) and containerised cloud deployments (GCP / Kubernetes).

  • Expert knowledge of the constraints of technical SEO at large scale (SSR/SSG/ISR, crawling, hydration, CDN caching strategies).

  • Advanced mastery of Core Web Vitals optimisation and network mechanisms (TCP/HTTP3, caching, tree-shaking, SSR streaming).

• Impact, Communication & Approach:

  • Go-to technical point of contact: autonomous, able to prioritise your work, make difficult trade-offs and align technical and business stakeholders.

  • Recognised mentor: passionate about developing senior and experienced profiles, a champion of rigorous code reviews and knowledge sharing.

  • Pragmatism & Delivery focus: ability to ship code to an exemplary standard while keeping an impact-oriented business perspective.

  • Run culture: total commitment to the availability, resilience and security of deployed services.

  • Fluent English is essential to work in an international, multi-site context.

 

WHAT WE OFFER YOU

Hybrid working arrangements;

Equipment provided in line with your missions and our social commitments (Mac or Windows);

A local project team within a global network (opportunities for international career development);

Skills development and support (variety of projects, internal and external training, etc.);

Remuneration package (employee shareholding, monthly/quarterly bonuses).

 

OUR COMMITMENT TO INCLUSION AND ACCESSIBILITY

At Decathlon, we recognise the immense value that diversity brings to our teams, and we continually strive to foster and cultivate an inclusive and equitable workplace: this is why Inclusion is one of our Human Fundamentals. We encourage people from all backgrounds and of all abilities to apply, because we are convinced that diversity of thought, cultures, identities and lived experiences makes us stronger.

Decathlon is also committed to offering an inclusive and accessible selection process to all candidates. If you need an adjustment, you can request it via the application form; this will be confidential. These requests do not affect the outcome of the recruitment process"