At Academy Sports + Outdoors our vision is to be the best sports + outdoors retailer in the country — but what truly sets us apart is our people. We’re a passionate, purpose-driven team that’s as committed to each other as we are to our customers.
We’ve spent over 80 years building a culture that puts people first. We believe in creating opportunities for growth, fostering meaningful connections, and supporting every Team Member’s journey. What fuels us? Our belief in the power of fun.
Here, you won’t just help customers gear up for their next adventure — you’ll launch one of your own. Whether you're starting out or leveling up, Academy is a place where fun can’t lose!
What You Will Work On
In this role, you lead the engineering capabilities that transform customer data and insights into relevant, personalized experiences across digital and marketing channels. Your work enables scalable personalization, journey orchestration, experimentation, and customer engagement across web, mobile, email, SMS, push, and emerging touchpoints. By connecting trusted customer data, content, offers, and decisioning technologies, you help create consistent experiences while supporting privacy, consent, and security requirements.
Working across Adobe Experience Cloud and related technologies, you establish reusable services, APIs, integrations, and engineering patterns that accelerate customer journey development and activation. You guide platform strategy and technical execution while strengthening reliability, performance, scalability, observability, and operational readiness. You also lead and develop engineering teams, coordinate internal and external partners, and collaborate across Product, Marketing, Data, Analytics, Architecture, Creative, Privacy, and Security to modernize the experience technology landscape.
Who You Will Work With
Your work connects Product, Marketing, Digital, Customer Data Technology, Analytics Engineering, Data Science, Marketing Analytics, Architecture, Creative, Privacy, Security, and technology partners. You collaborate with these groups to translate personalization, customer experience, and marketing strategies into scalable capabilities, prioritized roadmaps, trusted data activation, measurable experimentation, and secure customer experiences.
Across delivery, you coordinate employees, contractors, implementation partners, vendor engineering resources, software engineers, personalization engineers, experience engineers, and technical leads. You maintain internal technical ownership while aligning platform investments, architecture decisions, production support, content and experience delivery, advanced analytics, measurement, and execution across teams and partners.
What You Bring
Bring your energy, your ideas, and your love for sports and the outdoors.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Digital Technology, Marketing Technology, or a related field required
- Equivalent years of relevant work experience may be considered
- 7+ years in software engineering, personalization technology, digital experience engineering, marketing technology, or a related discipline
- 2+ years of technical leadership, team leadership, or people management, including coaching engineers or technical leads
- Leadership of engineering delivery for enterprise customer experience, personalization, journey orchestration, experimentation, or digital experience platforms
- Relevant Adobe Experience Cloud, cloud platform, software engineering, or product or platform certifications preferred
- Hands-on work with Adobe Experience Cloud technologies such as Adobe Experience Platform, Adobe Journey Optimizer, Adobe Target, Adobe Experience Manager, Customer Journey Analytics, Workfront, or comparable technologies
- Hands-on work with APIs, event-driven architectures, modern web and mobile architectures, SDKs, client-side and server-side integration patterns, event instrumentation, real-time data activation, and cloud-based software engineering
- Leadership of blended teams of employees, contractors, implementation partners, or vendor engineering resources preferred
- Retail, ecommerce, loyalty, or omnichannel customer experience preferred
- Strong knowledge of personalization, recommendation, offer, next-best-action, decisioning, journey orchestration, experimentation, and experience activation capabilities
- Strong software engineering leadership skills, including automated testing, CI/CD, API design, observability, platform engineering, reliability, performance, scalability, maintainability, and technical debt management
- Working knowledge of customer identity, customer data platforms, customer profiles, audiences, consent, preferences, suppression rules, privacy requirements, and real-time customer data activation
- Ability to establish reusable engineering patterns, services, APIs, integrations, templates, and frameworks that can be consumed across channels and products
- Ability to translate personalization, customer experience, and marketing strategies into scalable technology capabilities and prioritized roadmaps
- Ability to evaluate technology options based on business value, architectural fit, scalability, security, reliability, and total cost of ownership
- Strong cross-functional communication and stakeholder management skills across Product, Marketing, Digital, Data, Architecture, Creative, Analytics, Privacy, Security, and external partners
- Ability to manage capacity, delivery commitments, dependencies, risks, and technical execution across multiple teams and partners
- Ability to coach and develop software engineers, personalization engineers, experience engineers, and technical leads
- Knowledge of AI/ML-enabled personalization, recommendations, decisioning, content optimization, and AI-assisted engineering practices
- A team-first attitude; while your core duties are your priority, you're happy to step in wherever you're needed
Work Style and Physical Requirements
- Flexible work schedule may be required to support business needs, releases, or production issues
- Regular in-office attendance is required
- Acceptable level of hearing and vision to perform job duties
- Ability to adhere to company policies and professional standards
Key Skills
Establishing Processes, Integration Projects, Coaching and Developing Others, Technical Oversight, Dependency Management, Security
Equal Employment OpportunityAcademy is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate with regard to employment opportunities or practices on the basis of race, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, or any other category protected by law.
Skills Required
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, Digital Technology, Marketing Technology, or a related field
- Equivalent relevant work experience may be considered
- 7+ years of experience in software engineering, personalization technology, digital experience engineering, marketing technology, or a related discipline
- 2+ years of technical leadership, team leadership, or people management experience, including coaching engineers or technical leads
- Experience leading engineering delivery for enterprise customer experience, personalization, journey orchestration, experimentation, or digital experience platforms
- Hands-on experience with Adobe Experience Cloud or comparable technologies
- Hands-on experience with APIs, event-driven architectures, modern web and mobile architectures, SDKs, integration patterns, event instrumentation, real-time data activation, and cloud-based software engineering
- Knowledge of personalization, recommendations, offers, next-best-action, decisioning, journey orchestration, experimentation, and experience activation
- Strong software engineering leadership skills involving automated testing, CI/CD, API design, observability, reliability, performance, scalability, maintainability, and technical debt management
- Knowledge of customer identity, customer data platforms, customer profiles, audiences, consent, preferences, suppression rules, privacy requirements, and real-time customer data activation
- Ability to establish reusable engineering patterns, services, APIs, integrations, templates, and frameworks
- Ability to translate personalization, customer experience, and marketing strategies into scalable technology capabilities and prioritized roadmaps
- Ability to evaluate technology based on business value, architectural fit, scalability, security, reliability, and total cost of ownership
- Strong cross-functional communication and stakeholder management skills
- Ability to manage capacity, delivery commitments, dependencies, risks, and technical execution across multiple teams and partners
- Ability to coach and develop software engineers, personalization engineers, experience engineers, and technical leads
- Knowledge of AI/ML-enabled personalization, recommendations, decisioning, content optimization, and AI-assisted engineering practices
- Relevant Adobe Experience Cloud, cloud platform, software engineering, or product/platform certifications
- Experience leading blended teams of employees, contractors, implementation partners, or vendor engineering resources
- Retail, ecommerce, loyalty, or omnichannel customer experience experience
Academy Sports + Outdoors Compensation & Benefits Highlights
The following summarizes recurring compensation and benefits themes identified from responses generated by popular LLMs to common candidate questions about Academy Sports + Outdoors and has not been reviewed or approved by Academy Sports + Outdoors.
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Retirement Support — A dollar-for-dollar 401(k) match up to 6% and an employee stock purchase plan are consistently presented as core strengths. These features stand out within big-box retail and are frequently highlighted as valuable parts of total compensation.
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Wellbeing & Lifestyle Benefits — A 20% merchandise discount, pay-on-demand access to wages, and tuition reimbursement provide tangible everyday value. Onsite gym access in Katy corporate/DC locations and vendor discount networks further enhance lifestyle perks.
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Leave & Time Off Breadth — Paid time off, paid holidays, and defined maternity and parental leave are part of the standard package. Materials also indicate PTO availability for some part-time store roles in certain situations.
Academy Sports + Outdoors Insights
What We Do
At Academy Sports + Outdoors, we believe in the power of fun. And we believe in helping our customers have more of it. With a wide assortment of sporting and outdoors gear, Academy offers the best brands under one roof — curated to make the most of every budget. Day in and day out, our 20,000+ Team Members bring a sense of adventure, energy, and passion to work. Understanding our people and the things that matter to them has been at the core of Academy culture for over 80 years. We take pride in creating a workplace that values hard work, commitment, growth, and of course, FUN. Academy — headquartered in Katy, TX, a suburb of Houston — is one of the nation’s largest sporting goods and outdoor stores. We offer a broad assortment of quality hunting, fishing, and camping equipment and gear, as well as sports and leisure products, footwear, apparel, and much more. Originally founded in 1938 as a family business in Texas, Academy has grown to a wide network of stores across many states, with $6.8 billion in annual revenue.
