Staff Software Engineer

REI is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide hands-on technical leadership for their o9 planning platform as part of the Merchandising Planning Transformation (MPT). This role involves designing, building, and operating solutions across various planning domains and requires strong technical ownership and cross-functional collaboration.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as technical owner for one or more o9 planning domains (DP, AP, A&R, MFP) within the MPT roadmap
• Own and contribute hands-on to o9 configuration, extensions, integrations, and debugging across planning applications; drive issues to root cause and resolution in both development and production environments
• Own the operability and stability of planning systems in production, including monitoring, performance tuning, and incident response
• Align end-to-end architectures spanning o9, SAP (ECC/S/4), REI’s enterprise data platform (EDAP), and downstream systems
• Establish standards for o9 configuration, extensions, integrations, and performance across environments
• Build and maintain reliable, scalable integrations for master data, transactional data, forecast inputs, and planning outputs
• Partner with Data Engineering to ensure forecast drivers, history, hierarchies, and financial measures are accurate, validated, and production-ready
• Lead technical design and implementation during blueprint, build, SIT/UAT, and go-live phases. Make and drive technical decisions within planning systems, including solution design, data modeling, and integration approaches, balancing speed, scalability, and long-term maintainability
• Enable connected planning workflows across Demand → Assortment → Allocation/Replenishment → MFP
• Ensure consistent handling of product/location hierarchies, time grains, SKU logic, and financial rollups across planning domains
• Translate business and functional requirements into clear technical designs and system behavior
• Establish and maintain visibility within the department
• Monitor operational statistics, reports trends, variances and issues, and takes appropriate action
• Champion engineering quality, testability, and production readiness
• Evaluate technical tradeoffs and make decisions that align with business priorities, system constraints, and delivery timelines
• Partner with QA and Release teams to support SIT, UAT, performance testing, and cutover
• Provide Tier3 support and root cause analysis for production issues in planning platforms
• Collaborates with Enterprise Architecture to align and integrate business line initiatives with enterprise-wide strategic technology plans/roadmaps
• Drives successful delivery of projects in their portfolio including the oversight of Project Managers, Business Analysts, Software Engineers, System Engineers, Architects, QA Engineers, and Release Engineers as applicable. Scope of responsibility also includes any contract service providers as required. Ensures that development of technology services/solutions adheres to enterprise architectural standards, engineering, security and other applicable IT defined standards
• Mentor senior and midlevel engineers and raise overall technical maturity within the planning technology space
• Proactively surface technical risks, dependencies, and architectural tradeoffs to inform roadmap and sequencing decisions
• Responsible for projects in their portfolio to ensure they are completed on time, within budget, meet project success criteria as well deliver identified business value
• Collaborates with all IT departments and disciplines regarding service/solution design, development, testing, implementation and evaluation. Ensures that solutions meet business needs with respect to system architecture, functionality, performance, scalability, reliability, realistic implementation schedules, and adherence to development standards
• Communicates with team regarding policies and procedures, projects and activities in other groups
• Guides the team in the analysis of business requests and needs to ensure low-cost operation and effective utilization of staff and equipment including AI-ML based automations
• Follows the governance process for technology projects, ensuring that project goals and decisions are based upon business priorities
• Prepares budget recommendations for staffing needs, costs of equipment and tools, maintenance, and future projects
• Oversees management and support of delivered services/solutions. Including Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 technical support as applicable
• Ongoing continuous improvement to services as needed to meet business needs and service level expectations

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree in computer science or business administration, or equivalent training and experience
• 6+ years of experience in enterprise software engineering with strong system design and integration skills
• 3+ years of Hands on experience with o9 Solutions or comparable enterprise planning platforms
• 6 + years of hands-on Deep experience with data integrations, ETL/ELT pipelines, and large-scale data platform (e.g., Apache Spark, Airflow, Delta Lake, or similar lakehouse technologies), including working with complex, high dimensional data models
• 6+ years of professional experience in enterprise technology solutions including end-to-end Business Blueprinting, development, testing, support, and post-implementation tech solution refinement
• Ability to operate effectively in largescale, cross functional retail environments
• Knowledge of methodologies, standards, procedures and organization that contribute to the development and deployment of technology solutions
• Skills in resource management, project prioritization, problem solving, issue management and negotiation, and mediation
• Strong organizational skills and ability to handle multiple tasks and respond quickly to critical issues
• Systems analysis and design skills
• Knowledge of business principles from multiple disciplines and ability to apply those principles
• Experience with structured project life cycle, systems development management tools and service management methodologies such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
• Ability to manage customer and vendor relationships
• Ability to work collaboratively and across divisions
• Builds capacity of individuals and teams through effective employee development, involvement, communication, and supervision efforts
• Creates a strong, mutually supportive work spirit and culture where people can do their best
• Establishes trust and inspires others
• Makes effective organization and people decisions in a manner consistent with REI's values and ethics
• Delivers on commitments and holds others to same
• Champions the organization and advocates solutions in the overall Company's best interest
• Proven experience in implementing enterprise solutions on cloud technologies, such as AWS, Azure, or GCP
• Experience developing team-level plans and contributing to annual budgets
• Ability to negotiate contracts and agreements with vendors and service providers in the information technology business
• Knowledge in Predictive AI-ML based forecasting models and Agentic AI