Solution Architect - Athlete

Founded in 1948, DICK’S Sporting Goods first started as a bait-and-tackle shop in Binghamton, NY and has since rapidly expanded into a leading omnichannel retailer with more than 850 locations representing our multiple brands: DICK’S, House of Sport, Golf Galaxy, Public Lands, Going Going Gone, and more. Over the years, it’s been our relentless focus on inspiring, supporting and equipping athletes and outdoor enthusiasts to achieve their dreams that has allowed us to become the $13B company we are today. 

Our company is looking to invest in our future as we embark on a journey from being the best sports retailer in the world to becoming the best sports company in the world. We aim to build the ultimate athlete data set that will power our tools and platforms for the most personalized athlete experiences. Join us as we transform our technology, data and analytics to build next-gen tools and platforms for our athletes and teammates.  

JOB PURPOSE: 

The Solution Architect will lead the design and implementation of technology solutions for our emerging Athlete Experience investments in commerce and Store Tech domains. This includes driving the transformation and modernization of both new and legacy systems to deliver cloud-native, omni-channel capabilities across commerce and in-store experiences.  

Technology Design: Drives end-to-end technology designs for significant business opportunities through their experience, leadership, and deliverables. They are a catalyst to bringing the next-generation experiences for our athletes and teammates to life by leveraging forward-looking technologies and platforms. A Solution Architect works across many functions to drive end-to-end thinking and consensus towards a solution that will drive expected business value. 

Direct experience with designing and building Service-Oriented & Event-Driven Architectures, Azure Cloud Technologies & Services, Enterprise Data Storage & Compute platforms, Scaled Enterprise Data solutions, and Commerce vendor platforms is desired. 

Collaboration: Works with business stakeholders and product management to translate and map business goals into technology capabilities. Collaborate with other architects, platform engineers, and product engineers to create technical designs which leverage reference architecture patterns, meet enterprise design best practices, mature cross-domain shared services, and support foundational technology alignment, controls, and reliability. 

Documentation: Deliver artifacts to assess business & systems impact, publish current & transitional system diagrams, and ensure non-functional requirements are reviewed for foundational tech alignment & platform infrastructure planning. 

Integration: Incorporate inputs and controls from security, compliance, reliability, and performance engineering to meet the non-functional requirements. 

Responsibilities: 

Technical Leadership – 

• Stays current on emerging technical trends, patterns, and solutions for domain 

• Acts as resident expert for how technology in the domain is changing and influences business and technical teams to innovate and adopt 

• Acts as the end-to-end technical architecture lead for initiatives to collaborate, drive, and communicate design, context and considerations, including hands-on development of proof-of-concepts and reference architectures 

• Recommends, leads, and participates in solution architecture work for domain programs and outcomes ensuring that the proposed architecture solution is consistent with long-term strategic business objectives, aligns with technology platform roadmaps, and is supported by reference architecture patterns 

Solution Leadership –  

• Produces and maintains technology systems & solution views and technology roadmaps for their domain ensuring these are accurate, pragmatic and actionable with product engineering teams, business stakeholders, and foundational tech teams 

• Maintains a consistent solution architecture design for the domain. Maintains views for current and transitional states, risks and feasibility, and recommendations towards directional technology roadmaps 

• Drives execution for large business initiatives including documentation, roadmaps, communications, and alignment of solutions architecture into business, product and technical plans 

Solution Design & Delivery – 

• Organizes and leads discussions for technical design solutioning with engineering teams 

• Helps assist and drive domain and application roadmaps into actionable steps for engineering leaders 

• Updates and maintains technical domain leadership on reviews, risks and domain technical direction 

• Leads software engineers in solution architecture practices including reviewing potential technology solutions implementing proof of concepts, ensures critical design thinking, compliance standards, cross-team collaboration, alignment with broader platform architecture decisions, and input into the business and technology domain roadmaps 

• Shares best practices, technology patterns, lessons learned and updates the technical system architecture roadmap and reference architectures based on maturing technologies and knowledge related to recent, current, and upcoming technology vendor products and solutions 

Desired Tech Stack: 

• Variety of software stacks/technologies including but not limited to Cloud SAAS and PAAS offerings, Cloud Data/Storage platforms, Cloud and IOT container 

• Experience with Azure Cloud and related services 

• Strong understanding of containerized systems deployments with Kubernetes / Azure K8S 

• Experience with refactoring monolithic applications to Service Oriented (SOA) and Event Driven architectures, including the use of REST APIs / OpenAPI, Kafka / PubSub, MessageQueues / RabbitMQ, Databricks/Spark 

Job Requirements: 

• Experience as a technical architect for a major technology implementation in a retail or marketing project preferred 

• Experience designing solutions for the Retail industry including e-commerce, marketing, store tech, merchandising and/or supply chain. Experience with Customer identity and Commerce marketing, personalization, and loyalty programs is a plus 

• Experience with delivery of Business, Solution, Data and Infrastructure architectures including Reference Architectures, Implementations, and POCs  

• Experience translating solution architecture polished, well-formed artifacts that facilitate core stakeholder communications and syndication  

• Experience with collaborating directly with Product Management and Business Stakeholders on business and systems capability scoping and dependency mapping to inform roadmap and capacity planning 

Bonus Points: 

• Practical Hands-On Experience with Microsoft Azure and GCP cloud engineering and solutions 

• Experience leading and directing both internal engineering and 3rd party vendor teams through discovery, design, and delivery of large-scale enterprise solutions and associated architecture artifacts 

• Experience with various full-stack development with compute & data storage tech & platforms, streaming/event/queue integrations, service-oriented / container architectures 

• Experience with one or more of the following domains and tech topics: Retail Onsite Tech, E-commerce / Omni solutions, and/or Marketing Cloud platforms