Manager, Manufacturing Technology (LO Tech & Supply Chain Planning Management) 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 Engineering Manager, Planning & Manufacturing Technology is responsible for building and leading a diverse team of engineers, analysts, QA, and other technical professionals accountable for delivering technological capabilities in support of the planning and manufacturing of Columbia Sportswear products, in partnership with business stakeholders and architecture. Accountable to develop and execute strategies and plans to deliver business partner objectives with low-to-medium complexity. Responsible for the growth and development of members of the team, aligning individual interests, performance, and potential to organization needs and goals. Accountable for advancing the team’s technical foundation to deliver modern, simple, and secure solutions, and improve engineering skills within the development team. Champions adoption of DevOps practices to improve reliability, efficiency, and confidence of software delivery. This role partners with external software vendors, where applicable, to integrate seamlessly and drive value for the company.

Scope of delivery is for 1-3 teams, ideally in a single domain area. Sphere of influence is within own team and peer teams within the same domain/capability-area to lead and influence solid design and seamless integration.

How You’ll Make a Difference

• Delivery:
• Lead team(s) through the following facets of technical delivery, establishing a foundation and being an advocate for advancement in each area:
• Design & Implementation: Accountable for design, development, testing, maintenance, monitoring, and support of a platform or application. Ensure team maintains thoughtful application design that promotes reuse, portability, and ease of code maintenance. Build subject matter expertise in the business area that the domain supports. Highlight cost/benefits/risk/complexity for technology solutions and provide solution recommendations that meet/exceed business needs, optimizing costs and risks.
• 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.
• Observability: Lead team through regular review of system health, availability, performance, and business KPIs 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: Accountable for the team’s development of DevOps practices to continuously improve the technical foundation of solutions, driving advances in quality, security, privacy, reliability, availability, maintainability, accessibility, and performance. Stay current on technology landscape to find the right tool for every job. Ensure solutions stay modern, simple, and secure. Provide connectivity for responsible teams to the broader enterprise to advance technical objectives in concert with enterprise goals.
• Innovation: Accountable for the team’s exploration of new technologies and ways of technology delivery to advance team/business goals. Discover opportunities and lead exploration and evaluation of major systems, tools, and related architectural strategies in partnership with Architecture at a strategic enterprise level.
• Team Backlog & Roadmap:
• Responsible for implementation of the team’s technical roadmap that defines technical objectives to address current needs as well as advances the team’s long-term technical foundation. Collaborate with business stakeholders on execution delivery model (program or business-as-usual), rollout plans, change management, etc.
• Partner with business stakeholders to inform prioritization, identify dependencies, and influence the roadmap to ensure non-functional requirements are known and represented in roadmaps to help drive technical decisions. Provide data and insights to inform roadmap decisions such as performance and impact data relevant to digital initiatives, helping to define and track KPIs that measure value from technology investments, and evaluating outcomes to inform iteration, scale, or sunset decisions.
• Encourage and ensure that engineers on the team feel a shared ownership of the team’s backlog, and proactively contribute to it to advance the team’s technical roadmap. Work with leadership to raise visibility to and help resolve organizational impediments.
• Ways of Working:
• Build and foster adoption of technical delivery best practices across your teams.
• Choose the right delivery model (i.e. waterfall, single release, continuous delivery) for the work with appropriate delivery milestones and early testing.
• Participate in multiple teams’ ceremonies, as needed.
• Engage and offer feedback on work being delivered by the teams you lead.
• Help drive collaboration within the team through advocacy of practices such as pair programming.
• Actively seek ways to drive continuous improvement within team, including leading the team through implementation of new practices identified as part of the team’s continuous improvement goals.
• Assignment routing of prioritized work to teams.
• Lead teams through resolution of blockers.
• Architecture & Design: Partner with Architecture to understand, help define, and adopt enterprise best practices, frameworks, standards, patterns and technology goals. Responsible for delivery of cost-effective solutions that drive the right business value. Promote creation of proof of concepts for new patterns. Responsible for maintaining logical and physical architecture documentation for the capabilities and systems that the team is responsible for.
• Management/Team Development: Build a diverse team focused on digital delivery, including hiring, training, retaining, and career development of talent. Foster individual development through regular goal setting, coaching, and feedback loops. Actively foster career development for members of the team, aligning individual interests, performance, and potential to organization needs and goals. Partner with senior leadership to align individual’s career maps into organization needs through advancement opportunity planning.
• Vendor Engagement:
• In partnership with senior management, engage with established software and solution 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.
• Engage delivery partner vendors to ensure desired outcomes through high quality software deliverables that meet the team’s engineering standards.
• Financial:
• Adheres to budget guidelines and expectations to ensure vendors and contractors deliver in a fiscally responsible manner. Accountable for providing inputs to be used for cost center management.
• Identifies opportunities for cost savings that align with strategic goals for CSC digital technology. Control costs by supporting labor optimization efforts, providing input to procurement to negotiate terms of contracts.

YOU HAVE

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or an equivalent field. Relevant work experience in lieu of degree may be considered.
• 5+ years of progressively increasing leadership and management experience within Information Systems or Software Engineering, ideally in a complex, global environment
• Proven experience managing and mentoring teams of engineers, business systems analysts, and contractors to deliver complex, reliable solutions for a broad set of business stakeholders
• Experience building a software engineering culture and delivering software and data integrations that adhere to modern engineering principles
• Industry experience in Apparel and Footwear preferred
• Proven experience in strategic planning and alignment of business objectives with technology and systems roadmaps
• Demonstrated success leading portfolios, programs, and projects, including change management, process improvement, business analysis practices, and associated standards, tools, training, and testing
• Strong track record of leading and communicating through change within a matrixed organization
• Experience managing departmental budgets, financial planning, and cost controls
• Strong functional understanding of a modern supply chain
• Experience with Enterprise Planning and/or PLM software is preferred

#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.