Innovate in Kirkland
This position is based at our Innovation Labs headquarters in Kirkland, Washington. Our facility features cutting-edge technology, private research and development spaces housing groundbreaking products, and open floor plans designed to foster collaboration and creativity—all to enhance your work experience.
Your Impact
Lowe’s Innovation Labs is a specialized innovation unit that keeps Lowe’s ahead of what’s next. We explore disruptive technologies, conduct hands-on applied R&D, and help the enterprise adopt promising new capabilities with less uncertainty and friction.
The Sr Manager, Software Engineering – Innovation leads R&D engineering teams that focus on exploring and incubating promising experiences and capabilities for spatial computing platforms, next-gen wearables, and more, all with the goal of creating meaningful capabilities for Lowe’s customers, associates, and enterprise.
This leader serves as a player/coach, combining hands-on experience with frontier technologies with deep engineering management discipline. Deep experience with emerging platforms and AI-augmented workflows and the ability to guide multi-disciplinary engineers with diverse backgrounds is a must. This role balances the speed and flexibility required for innovation with experience in navigating large enterprises and forging deep, cross-functional partnerships that lead to successful product/platform transitions.
What You Will Do
- Leads and develops high-performing engineering teams, setting clear expectations, providing coaching and feedback, managing performance, and fostering an inclusive culture where associates are encouraged to experiment, learn, and achieve their potential.
- Inspires teams to push the boundaries of emerging technology while grounding exploration in clear hypotheses, learning objectives, customer needs, and potential business value.
- Maintains strong working fluency in frontier technologies relevant to their focus area and broad awareness of adjacent areas such as advanced AI, agentic systems, robotics, spatial computing, digital twins, simulation, interactive 3D, emerging hardware, and more.
- Evaluates emerging technologies, platforms, architectures, and development approaches and provides technical direction on their opportunities, limitations, risks, maturity, and applicability to Lowe’s.
- Establishes AI-augmented ways of working across engineering, research, analysis, experimentation, testing, and communication, identifying durable opportunities where AI and automation can improve team throughput and quality.
- Steers initiatives through a disciplined, applied R&D lifecycle from signal and exploration through prototype, proof of concept, pilot, and candidate for scale, establishing clear hypotheses, success metrics, learning objectives, and decision points to scale, pivot, continue, or stop.
- Balances the portfolio across speculative exploration, focused incubation, and near-scale initiatives, making clear resource allocation and prioritization decisions as new technical, customer, and business signals emerge.
- Establishes engineering standards, OKRs, and operating practices that balance experimentation speed with accountable delivery and ensures the appropriate level of quality, security, reliability, architecture, and operational readiness as solutions mature.
- Identifies reusable technical capabilities, architectural patterns, tooling, and platforms that can accelerate multiple innovation initiatives and leads efforts to resolve systemic engineering or organizational barriers.
- Maintains a deep understanding of Lowe’s customers, Pros, associates, operations, and business partners and ensures teams use field observations, customer and associate research, data, and experimentation to inform technology strategies and roadmaps.
- Influences technical and business decisions using experimentation results, customer insights, data, and strong engineering judgment, representing Innovation Labs’ perspective and recommendations credibly with senior leaders.
- Creates compelling narratives, executive presentations, demonstrations, and technical artifacts that clearly communicate the vision, opportunity, learnings, business value, roadmap, and risks of emerging technology initiatives, while coaching engineers to communicate effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor’s degree in computer science, computer engineering, software engineering, computer information systems (CIS), or related field, or equivalent years of experience in lieu of education requirements, if applicable.
- 8 years of experience in software engineering, technology development, applied R&D, or related technical fields.
- Hands-on experience with 1-2 emerging technology areas: examples include, but are not limited to agentic systems, robotics, computer vision, spatial computing, digital twins, simulation, interactive 3D, IoT, world models, video diffusion, neural rendering, reconstruction, and shading, Gaussian splatting, and NeRFs.
- 8 years of experience designing, developing, integrating, or delivering software-based technology solutions.
- 3 years of experience leading engineering or technical teams with or without formal direct-report responsibility, including technical direction, coaching, mentoring, and performance management.
- Demonstrated experience leading technically complex initiatives involving ambiguity, experimentation, or emerging technologies.
- Experience designing and evaluating modern software architectures, platforms, APIs, data-driven systems, or cloud-based solutions.
- Demonstrated ability to translate complex technical capabilities into customer, operational, or business opportunities and communicate recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Preferred Skills/Education
- Master’s degree in computer science, engineering, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer interaction, or related technical field.
- Experience working in applied research, innovation labs, advanced engineering, emerging technology, or product incubation environments.
- Experience taking emerging technologies from early exploration through prototypes and pilots toward production or enterprise scale.
- Experience applying AI-assisted development tools and AI-augmented engineering workflows.
- Experience working with enterprise architecture, infrastructure, cybersecurity, AI/data platforms, and other technology organizations to transition experimental solutions toward production.
- Experience working with startups, technology vendors, research institutions, or strategic technology partners.
- Experience managing multiple concurrent initiatives with different levels of technical uncertainty, maturity, and risk.
- Experience in technology leadership within retail, home improvement, supply chain, or another large-scale customer-facing industry.
- Experience in a technical leadership role requiring regular interaction with senior or executive leadership.
Pay Range: $147,400.00 - $280,100.00 annually
Starting rate of pay may vary based on factors including, but not limited to, position offered, location, education, training, and/or experience. For information regarding our benefit programs and eligibility, please visit https://talent.lowes.com/us/en/benefits.
Associate Benefits (https://talent.lowes.com/us/en/joining-our-team)
- Working at one of the largest retail companies has its perks. We offer exceptional benefits and wellness programs for eligible full-time and part-time associates, tailored for many different lifestyles. Our benefits range from health, vision and dental insurance to paid vacation, tuition assistance and parental and family-building benefits. Plus, we offer learning and development opportunities to help our associates grow their skills and achieve their goals.
- Health, Dental and Vision insurance
- Life and Disability insurance
- Paid time off based on role, tenure, and locality, including vacation, holidays, sick and volunteer time
- Flexible spending and health savings accounts
- 401(k) Retirement account with company match
- Employee Assistance Program with concierge, work/life services and no-cost counseling for all kinds of needs
- Education support programs, including tuition assistance and trade skills scholarships
- Business Travel Accident insurance
- Maternity and Parental leave
- Adoption assistance
- Lowe's Associate Discount and broad discount platform
- Other discretionary benefits (based on eligibility) include annual bonuses, enrollment in Lowe's Employee Stock Purchase Plan and/or deferred compensation plan, and grant awards
About Lowe’s
Lowe’s Companies, Inc. (NYSE: LOW) is a FORTUNE® 100 home improvement company with total fiscal year 2025 sales of more than $86 billion. Lowe’s employs approximately 300,000 associates and operates over 1,750 home improvement stores, 540 branches and 120 distribution centers. Lowe’s is a core value S&P 500 equity stock and a dividend aristocrat. Based in Mooresville, N.C., Lowe’s supports the communities it serves through programs focused on creating safe, affordable housing, improving community spaces, helping to develop the next generation of skilled trade experts and providing disaster relief to communities in need. For more information, visit Lowes.com.
Lowe’s is an equal opportunity employer and administers all personnel practices without regard to race, color, religious creed, sex, gender, age, ancestry, national origin, mental or physical disability or medical condition, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, marital status, military or veteran status, genetic information, or any other category protected under federal, state, or local law.
