Solution Architect - Inventory & Merchandising (REMOTE)

DICK'S Sporting Goods

6d • Remote

About The Position

The Solution Architect – Inventory & Merchandising is responsible for leading technology design and solutioning for DSG's most complex and strategically significant inventory and merchandising initiatives. This role spans the architecture of systems across merchandising, supply chain, store systems, omnichannel fulfillment, and enterprise data platforms — driving the design and transformation of systems to deliver modern, cloud-native solutions that unify inventory visibility, enable smarter buying decisions, and support enterprise goals. As the Solution Architect – Inventory & Merchandising, you will drive end-to-end technology designs for critical business opportunities at DICK’S Sporting Goods, acting as a catalyst for innovative solutions across a cross-functional landscape. You’ll collaborate across business, product, and engineering functions to align strategic goals with technical solutions, ensuring enterprise consistency and value delivery. This role works closely with business and product management to translate strategic inventory and merchandising goals into technology capabilities. The Solution Architect collaborates with domain architects, platform engineers, and product teams to guide technical designs, leveraging reference architecture patterns, maturing cross-domain shared services, and ensuring alignment with foundational technologies, security, and reliability standards. Direct experience with Service-Oriented and Event-Driven Architectures, Azure Cloud Technologies, Enterprise Data Platforms, merchandise planning systems (e.g., financial planning, assortment planning, buy planning), ERP platforms, supply chain and warehouse management systems, and omnichannel fulfillment platforms is desired. This role will be hands-on, collaborating with engineering and platform teams to design, build, and deliver solution spikes and proof-of-concepts to validate designs and advance DSG’s enterprise technology capabilities. The Solution Architect also delivers artifacts to assess business and systems impacts, maintains current and transitional systems diagrams, and ensures non-functional requirements (security, compliance, reliability, performance) are met. They work with stakeholders to turn design options, risks, and feasibility assessments into actionable technology roadmaps.

Requirements

• Experience with cloud SaaS and PaaS offerings, cloud data/storage platforms, and containerized systems (e.g., Kubernetes, Azure AKS).
• Proficiency in Azure Cloud services and enterprise data platforms, including operational data stores, data lakes, and analytical platforms (e.g., Databricks, Azure Synapse).
• Strong understanding of Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Event-Driven Architectures, including REST APIs, OpenAPI, Kafka, PubSub, Message Queues, and streaming integrations.
• Familiarity with retail merchandise planning and inventory management systems — financial planning, assortment planning, order management, warehouse management, or equivalent.
• Experience designing real-time or near-real-time data integration solutions across heterogeneous system landscapes, including ERP platforms and supply chain systems.
• Experience refactoring monolithic applications into modern, cloud-native architectures.
• 7–10+ years as a technical architect in major technology implementations, ideally in retail, inventory management, supply chain, or merchandising domains is strongly preferred.
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Azure engineering and solutions.
• Experience designing solutions for inventory management, supply chain, merchandising, or omnichannel fulfillment domains — with the ability to speak credibly to business stakeholders about how retail systems work.
• Proven delivery of business, solution, data, and infrastructure architectures, including reference architectures, implementations, and proof-of-concepts.
• Experience producing polished artifacts for stakeholder communication and syndication.
• Strong collaboration with Product Management and Business Stakeholders for capability scoping and roadmap planning.
• Experience leading internal and third-party vendor teams through discovery, design, and delivery of enterprise solutions.
• Expertise in full-stack integration design, compute and data storage platforms, streaming/event/queue integrations, and service-oriented/container architectures.
• Familiarity with retail merchandise planning or inventory management platforms (financial planning, assortment planning, order management, warehouse management).
• Experience with demand forecasting, ML-driven optimization, or analytics platforms and their integration into operational retail workflows.
• Experience leading or significantly contributing to enterprise SaaS migrations or platform modernization initiatives.
• Substantial general work experience together with comprehensive job related experience in own area of expertise to fully competent level. (Over 6 years to 10 years)
• Experience of general supervision of more junior colleagues (7 to 12 months)

Responsibilities

• Stays current on emerging technical trends, patterns, and solutions in retail inventory management, merchandising, supply chain, and enterprise data domains.
• Acts as the resident expert on technology trends, influencing business and technical teams to adopt innovative solutions.
• Leads end-to-end technical architecture for initiatives, driving collaboration, communication, and hands-on development of proof-of-concepts and reference architectures.
• Recommends and leads solution architecture work, ensuring alignment with long-term business objectives, platform roadmaps, and reference architecture patterns.
• Produces and maintains technology systems views and roadmaps for inventory and merchandising domains, ensuring accuracy and actionability for engineering, business, and foundational tech teams.
• Maintains consistent solution architecture designs, including current and transitional states, risks, feasibility, and directional roadmaps.
• Drives execution of large-scale initiatives through documentation, roadmaps, communications, and alignment with business, product, and technical plans.
• Organizes and leads technical design discussions with engineering teams to develop robust integration and data solutions across a complex, multi-system landscape.
• Assists in translating domain and application roadmaps into actionable steps for engineering leaders.
• Keeps technical leadership informed on reviews, risks, and domain direction.
• Guides engineers in solution architecture practices, including technology evaluations, proof-of-concepts, compliance, cross-team collaboration, and alignment with platform architecture and roadmaps.
• Shares best practices, technology patterns, and lessons learned, updating system architecture roadmaps and reference architectures based on evolving technologies and vendor solutions.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level