Solution Architect / Principal Software Engineer - Commerce & Engagement Technology

OUTGROWN YOUR OWN BACKYARD? COME PLAY IN OURS.

At Columbia, we’re as passionate about the outdoors as you are. And while our gear is available worldwide, we’re proud to be based in the Pacific Northwest, where natural wonders are our playground. 

Every product we make and every task we undertake is inspired by the famous words of our founder Gert Boyle: “It’s perfect. Now make it better.” As pioneers of relentless improvement, we are constantly evolving.

We believe the outdoors is ours to protect and strive to keep our planet healthy. We believe in empowering people to experience the outdoors to the fullest. 

And we believe in you.

ABOUT THE POSITION

Although we're an apparel and footwear-focused company, technology is central to everything we do. Columbia Sportswear’s Digital Technology (CDT) group enables an IT infrastructure and applications across four global brands, a global supply chain, and 500+ geographically dispersed stores. These teams support in-store, mobile, and data platforms to enhance customer interface and service in an ever-evolving industry.

The Software Engineer designs, develops, tests, deploys, monitors, and supports software solutions. This role ensures quality, security, privacy, reliability, availability, maintainability, performance, compatibility and integrations of solutions throughout. This person advances the team's technical foundation to deliver modern, simple, and secure solutions, and lift engineering skills within the squad. The role adopts DevOps practices to improve efficiency and confidence of software delivery. This role partners with Architects, Product Managers, and Agile Leaders to implement and refine technical architectural designs in alignment with enterprise standards, and to deliver software in an agile way with continuous improvement in mind.

Scope of delivery is for an entire domain or capability area, which is comprised of multiple squads. Sphere of influence is across domains throughout the enterprise. Provide connectivity for responsible area to the broader enterprise to advance technical objectives in concert with enterprise goals. Partner with peer engineers across the enterprise to define technical objectives and roadmaps for technical evolution of systems.

Level of complexity of autonomous work: High

Experience level: Expert

HOW YOU’LL MAKE A DIFFERENCE

• Development:
  • Design & Implementation: Responsible for design, development, testing, maintenance, monitoring, and support of a platform or application. Maintain thoughtful application design that promotes reuse, portability, and ease of code maintenance. Builds subject matter expertise in the business area that the domain supports. Leads design work for reference implementations.
  • Quality and Performance: Establish and manage quality standards, decisions, and implementations. Leverage automation where possible to create efficiency and reliability in delivery of software. Ensure application performance, uptime, and scale. Define and maintain high standards of code quality. Practice in peer code reviews to ensure quality and knowledge transfer in part of regular delivery. Triage and/or consult on troubleshooting and bug fixes, security risks, etc. Design and maintain infrastructure, shared libraries, and solutions with a broad, foundational scope. Identify bottlenecks and improve software efficiency.
  • Observability: Leverage best practices, technologies, and instrumentation to monitor and observe health, availability, and performance of software in production and to inform roadmap/backlog improvements. Partner with peers and central teams to evolve best practices and technologies to meet business goals, while also staying modern and secure.
  • Technical Advancement: Employ expert-level DevOps practices to advance the technical foundation of solutions, driving advances in quality, security, privacy, reliability, availability, maintainability, and performance. Create and manage both team-specific and extended libraries and customizations of DevOps CI/CD pipelines. Stay current on technology landscape to find the right tool for every job. Ensure solutions stay modern, simple, and secure. Provide connectivity for responsible squads to the broader enterprise to advance technical objectives in concert with enterprise goals.
  • Innovation: Explore new technologies and ways of software delivery to advance team/business goals. Create proof of concepts to experiment new ideas, and lead efforts to move them to production in partnership with Product Owners. Discover opportunities and lead exploration and evaluation of major systems, tools, and related architectural strategies in partnership with Architecture at a strategic enterprise level.
• Product Backlog & Roadmap Input: Contribute to the team's backlog to capture work that promotes the team's mission and advances the team's technical foundation. Partner with teammates to refine the product backlog, adding detail and organization to delivery ideas. Partner with the team's Product Manager to inform prioritization, identify dependencies, and influence the product roadmap. Participate with peer engineers across the enterprise to define technical objectives and long-term technical roadmaps. Establish forward-looking plans to identify a roadmap for transitioning as programming languages, frameworks, etc. evolve. Champion prioritization and refinement of backlog Sagas and Epics related to infrastructure, feature implementation, tech debt, modernization, simplification, etc. to drive technical maturity and strategy. Partner with Product Owners and Principal Engineers to ensure non-functional requirements are known and represented in product roadmaps to help drive technical decisions. Work with Leadership to raise visibility to and help resolve organizational impediments.
• Agile Delivery: Participate in multiple teams' agile ceremonies, including daily stand-up, backlog refinement, planning, review/demo, and retrospectives as needed. Apply expert knowledge to understand size, conduct initial analysis breakdown, and provide initial intake support. Help to drive collaboration within the team through practices such as pair programming. Actively seek ways to drive continuous improvement within team. Assignment routing of prioritized work to squads. Assist with triaging high impact bugs, defects and issues that come in, especially complex issues and those related to foundational libraries that impact multiple squads.
• Architecture & Design: Partner with Architecture to understand, help define, and adopt enterprise best practices, frameworks, standards, patterns and technology goals. Make strategic design decisions in collaboration with peers, taking into consideration technical debt, modernization and simplification for risk mitigation. Implements reference architectures with tool selection and implementation to deliver cost effective solutions that drive the right business value. Conduct proof of concepts for new patterns. Help maintain architecture documentation for the capabilities and systems that the team is responsible for. Provide documentation oversight for architectural roadmap, technical designs, and core components designs for multiple squads. Documentation scope includes strategic transformational shifts, code, design, and landscape with an objective of evolving the domain.
• Mentoring/Team Development: Mentor individuals, squads, leaders, and/or organizations on technical delivery and architectural shifts. Work to build technical skills in teammates through direction, example, and by creating opportunities for others to learn. Share knowledge through talks and presentations to the enterprise. Leads communities of practice on technical topics. Partner with senior leadership to identify areas needing additional mentorship.
• Vendor Engagement (as applicable): In partnership with management, engage vendors on their technical roadmaps and inform the team’s future adoption/strategy, and set technical direction to influence vendor roadmaps. Conduct quarterly check-ins with vendors to ensure SLAs are being met. Ensure key consumption KPIs are being monitored for cost management and compliance with agreements. Develop strategic partnerships with key vendors. Participate in vendor evaluations, proof-of-concepts, and solution optioning in partnership with Architecture. Ability to identify new solution impact across the enterprise including foundational products.

YOU ARE 

• Curious and passionate about innovation and technical excellence.
• Educator and influencer for people at all levels in the organization.
• Passionate to make the Consumer’s experience seamless and exceptional.
• Organized and detail-oriented with excellent presentation and communication skills .
• Self-motivated and able to operate independently within general guidelines.
• Conceptual & strategic thinker who can convert ideas and concepts into roadmaps and pragmatic plans.
• Well-versed in cloud technologies and practices especially for AWS and/or Azure.
• Familiar with DevOps and continuous development practices.
• Proven ability to respond to different organizational situations while maintaining a positive and friendly attitude is necessary.
• Respectful of others and will uphold Columbia’s values.
• Able to work efficiently and accurately under pressure, meet deadlines and present a professional demeanor.

YOU HAVE 

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or an equivalent field.
• 10+ years of experience engineering high-volume, highly available applications in AWS and/or Azure cloud environment.
• Experience with modern cloud architecture patterns.
• Experience with Mobile application development.
• Deep knowledge of Commerce business processes.
• Experience working in an Agile environment (Scrum preferred) including breaking down technology vision into components that deliver value incrementally.
• Ability to learn and understand key business processes and systems.
• Thought leader and able to define technical strategic roadmaps
• Technical skills include AWS (Lamdas, EventBridge, S3, etc), Azure(Service Bus, FunctionApps, Logic Apps), Node.js (Javascript), .NET (C#), automation, observability.
• Experience leading engineering with both on-shore and off-shore teams.
• Experience with the following functional / systems areas are preferred:
  • eCommerce (SalesForce Commerce Cloud)
  • Payment Systems (Adyen, ApplePay, etc)
  • Order Management
  • Consumer personalization
  • Loyalty programs

#LI-JD1

This job description is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of duties and responsibilities, but constitutes a general definition of the position's scope and function in the company. 

Columbia Sportswear is an equal opportunity employer. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics. The Know Your Rights poster is available here: https://www.eeoc.gov/poster The pay transparency policy is available here: https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/OFCCP/pdf/pay-transp_%20English_formattedESQA508c.pdf Columbia Sportswear is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodations to individuals with disabilities. If you need a reasonable accommodation because of a disability for any part of the employment process, please notify your recruiter.

At Columbia Sportswear Company, we’re proud to offer regular full-time employees a benefits package that includes a variety of services and products to help make your life and work more rewarding. Our benefit programs contribute to overall employee well-being by aligning those programs with the fundamental elements of well-being: physical, social/emotional, financial, career and community. Benefits that can protect your family’s financial future and help you save money through our 401k plan plus a generous company match. Columbia offers medical, dental, vision, life Insurance, disability, flexible spending accounts, health savings account, and an assortment of voluntary benefit offerings (accident, critical illness, hospital indemnity, and legal services). In addition, Columbia offers EAP + which is free and confidential 24/7/365 counseling services. We have extensive wellness benefits, employee discounts and a generous time off program available.

If you need an accommodation/adjustment to successfully complete and submit your application, please reach out to [email protected] with the Subject: Applicant Assistance Requested.