Principal Software Engineer (Consumer Growth Platforms)
ExternalPrepare for this interview
EliteAI-generated questions, company research, and talking points tailored to this role
About the role
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, backlo