Principal Software Engineer (Marketing Technology) Full Time

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 a single squad. Sphere of influence is within own squad and peer squads within the same domain or capability area to lead and influence solid design and seamless integration.

Level of complexity of autonomous work: High

Experience level: Senior/Lead

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 platform or application supports. Lead with high autonomy the execution and utilization of reference implementations, best practices, frameworks and standards, and architectural and design decisions within a squad. Notify technical stakeholders (ie: dependent teams) of material technical or functional changes.
• 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, consistency and knowledge transfer in part of regular delivery. Troubleshoot and fix bugs, security risks, etc. Identify bottlenecks, patterns, and potential solutions related to incoming bugs and defects to improve software efficiency. Partner with peer engineers on software development lifecycle improvements. Create and maintain support playbooks.
• Observability: Leverage best practices, technologies, and instrumentation to lead the team in regular monitoring and observation of health, availability, and performance of software in production to provide appropriate application support and inform roadmap/backlog improvements. Partner with the squad and peers across squads to diagnose performance issues found in monitoring. Identify and implement new monitoring and proactive alerting mechanisms to inform the squad of issues before problems reach consumers/stakeholders.
• Technical Advancement: Employ senior-level DevOps practices to advance the technical foundation of solutions, driving advances in quality, security, privacy, reliability, availability, maintainability, and performance. Stay current on technology landscape to find the right tool for every job. Ensure solutions stay modern, simple, and secure.
• Innovation: Explore new technologies and ways of software delivery to advance team/business goals. Identify opportunities for and create proof of concepts to experiment new ideas. Make recommendations based on learnings from POCs. Participate in exploration and evaluation of major systems and tools 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. Partner with peer Engineers and the Product Owner to lead the team in breaking down larger bodies of work (epics) into smaller, well understood items (stories) that can be accomplished in a single iteration. Ensure stories have clear understood value and defined acceptance criteria. Communicate with key partner/dependent squads to understand scope of planned work and translate to impact to own squad. Partner with Product Managers in the domain to inform prioritization, identify dependencies, and influence the product roadmap. Generate stories for backlog to address performance, non-functional requirements, tech debt, modernization, simplification, etc.
• Agile Delivery: Participate in team’s agile ceremonies, including daily stand-up, backlog refinement, planning, review/demo, and retrospectives. Help drive collaboration within the team through practices such as pair programming. Actively seeks ways to drive continuous improvement within team. Lead team through resolution of blockers, and implementation of new practices identified as part of team’s continuous improvement goals.
• Architecture & Design: Has a solid understanding of the team’s application architecture and how it fits into the team’s broader area as well as to the enterprise via key dependencies. Partner with Solution Architects to understand, help define, and adopt enterprise patterns and technology goals. Implement reference architectures with tool selection and implementation to deliver cost effective solutions that drive the right business value. Help maintain architecture documentation for the capabilities and systems that the team is responsible for.
• Mentoring/Team Development: Mentor individuals in the squad and peers on partner squads on technical delivery. Work to build technical skills in teammates through direction, example, and by creating opportunities for others to learn. Participate in communities of practice on technical topics and encourages team members to join where technical interests or development opportunities align.
• Vendor Engagement (as applicable): Partner with established vendors on implementations, modernization, capability improvements, framework updates, etc. Influence small-to-mid sized level partners’ roadmaps. Perform technical evaluations and make recommendations around new incoming solutions.

YOU ARE

• Genuinely curious, you ask why, not just how. You dig into how enterprise systems talk to each other, why an integration pattern was chosen, and what could break at 2 AM. You bring that curiosity to your squad and make it contagious.
• A master of async communication, you write the way a distributed team needs you to write. Decision logs, architectural decision records, integration runbooks, and status updates that your Portland teammates can act on independently without waiting for a call. You default to documentation over meetings.
• Globally minded, with firsthand experience working across distributed, cross-cultural teams. You understand the discipline, empathy, and intentionality required to make a geographically separated team feel cohesive, and you’ve done it in practice, not just in theory.
• A leader of communication and alignment across teams, building strong cross-functional relationships and driving decisions forward in a complex, matrixed environment that spans ERP, CRM, and digital teams.
• A force-multiplier who elevates the people around you, through mentorship, thorough code review, well-documented architectural decisions, and a bias toward teaching over doing for others.
• Pragmatic and hands-on, with strong opinions loosely held. Comfortable making judgment calls on integration tradeoffs (consistency vs. availability, API contract stability vs. feature velocity) and explaining the reasoning clearly.

YOU HAVE

• Bachelor’s degree, applicable certification or equivalent experience.
• 8+ years’ professional experience
• Deep expertise in TypeScript and Node.js for server-side development, including async patterns, error handling, modular package design, and type safety at scale.
• Demonstrated experience building and operating serverless / cloud functions (Azure Functions, AWS Lambda, or equivalent) in production including cold start management, function-level scaling, and distributed deployment strategies.
• Strong RESTful API design and integration skills contract-first design, schema evolution, error handling strategies, and building resilient client integrations against third-party systems.
• Experience integrating with enterprise ERP or CRM systems (SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, or similar) — including understanding data flow, approval workflows, and handling async confirmation loops between systems.
• Experience with B2B Commerce Platforms like NuOrder, RepSpark, or JOOR.
• Solid front-end proficiency with a modern JavaScript framework (React, Angular, or Vue), including state management patterns, component architecture, and performance optimization.
• Demonstrated expertise architecting and evolving CI/CD pipelines, including automated testing, deployment gates, environment parity, and release confidence.
• Proven track record in agile delivery including backlog ownership, epic decomposition, and iterative delivery in a cross-functional squad.
• Demonstrated experience working on globally distributed teams, with peers, stakeholders, or leadership based in a different country or region. Experience in an India GCC, offshore delivery model, or multinational organization is strongly preferred.
• Strong written and verbal English communication skills, including the ability to write clear technical documentation, decision logs, API runbooks, and async status updates that remote teammates can act on independently.
• Experience with canvas-based UI engineering (Fabric.js, Konva, or similar) for interactive web application features beyond standard form/list UIs.
• Experience with Excel or PDF document generation in a server-side context (SheetJS, ExcelJS, PDFKit, or similar libraries), particularly in a data-heavy wholesale or B2B ordering context.
• Background in disaster recovery planning, including DR runbooks, failover testing, RTO/RPO modeling, and integrating DR practices into regular engineering delivery.
• Familiarity with Azure DevOps, Azure Monitor, or Application Insights for pipeline and observability tooling.

#Hybrid

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.