Principal Software Engineer Consumer Service

About The Position

Although were 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 teams 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 teams backlog to capture work that promotes the teams mission and advances the teams 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 teams agile ceremonies, including daily stand-up, backlog refinement, planning, review/demo, and retrospectives. Help drive collaboration within the team through practices such as pair programming. Actively seeks ways to drive continuous improvement within team. Lead team through resolution of blockers, and implementation of new practices identified as part of teams continuous improvement goals.
• Architecture & Design: Has a solid understanding of the teams application architecture and how it fits into the teams broader area as well as to the enterprise via key dependencies. Partner with Solution Architects to understand, help define, and adopt enterprise patterns and technology goals. Implement reference architectures with tool selection and implementation to deliver cost effective solutions that drive the right business value. Help maintain architecture documentation for the capabilities and systems that the team is responsible for.
• Mentoring/Team Development: Mentor individuals in the squad and peers on partner squads on technical delivery. Work to build technical skills in teammates through direction, example, and by creating opportunities for others to learn. Participate in communities of practice on technical topics and encourages team members to join where technical interests or development opportunities align.
• Vendor Engagement (as applicable): Partner with established 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.
  
  

• A leader of communication and alignment across teams, building strong cross‑functional relationships and driving decisions and outcomes in a complex, matrixed organization.
• Someone that identifies, prioritizes, and drives continuous improvement initiatives across business processes and system solutions, ensuring changes are implemented, adopted, and deliver measurable value.
• A tone-setter for learning and adaptability, embracing change and using experimentation and data to guide solution direction and reduce uncertainty for the team.
• A steward of the customer experience, consistently framing technical and delivery decisions through the lens of user impact, stakeholder needs, and long‑term sustainability.
• A force-multiplier that elevates team effectiveness through leadership and collaboration, proactively sharing context, mentoring others, facilitating healthy debate, and constructively engaging stakeholders to move work forward.
  
  

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Electrical Engineering and/or applied relevant experience in technology, or related fields.
• 8+ years of professional experience
• 5+ years of experience working with Salesforce core ecosystem components, including Service Cloud and Order Management/Servicing.
• 5+ years of experience developing, unit testing, deploying, and troubleshooting Apex code.
• Demonstrated expertise integrating with RESTful APIs, including designing resilient client integrations and handling schema evolution, failures, and performance concerns.
• Experience with Conversational AI platforms like AgentForce, [24]7.ai, Kore.ai, or Amazon Lex is preferred.
• Demonstrated expertise in architecting and evolving CI/CD pipelines, applying Continuous Delivery best practices to improve reliability, speed, and quality of software delivery.
• Experience with Agile frameworks such as Scrum or Kanban, including applying principles to deliver high-quality software in iterative cycles.
• Experience participating in on-call support rotations, using operational insights to drive improvements in application design, monitoring, and resiliency to minimize future support burden.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate complex technical concepts clearly and effectively—both in writing and verbally—to a wide range.