Principal Engineer - Retail

In Short As Principal Engineer - Retail, you will chart the architectural vision and technical strategy for On's global physical and omnichannel retail systems. Reporting to the Senior Director of Commercial Technology, you will lead the evolution of high-scale, resilient platforms across Point of Sale (POS), digital payments, fiscalization, and omnichannel store operations. You will champion modern software engineering principles, moving beyond off-the-shelf configurations to engineer scalable, distributed systems that power seamless athlete and runner experiences worldwide across our expanding footprint. Your Mission

• Architect Global Retail Systems: Define and drive the multi-year architecture north star for On's global retail ecosystem, designing decoupled, event-driven architectures that span next-generation POS, payment gateways, omnichannel services, and store operational platforms.
• Master Core Domain Capabilities: Act as On's foremost authority in retail engineering, establishing resilient technical solutions for real-time payments, international fiscalization compliance, offline-first reliability, inventory replenishment, and clienteling touchpoints.
• Elevate Software Engineering Excellence: Set high standards for distributed systems design, data consistency, and code quality across teams, prioritizing bespoke, cloud-native engineering and decoupled services over monolithic or configuration-only enterprise tools.
• Ensure Operational Resilience: Champion an operational excellence mindset across global retail infrastructure, defining robust SLOs, observability standards (distributed tracing, telemetry), disaster recovery, and peak-trading launch preparedness.
• Drive Cross-Domain Strategic Alignment: Partner with senior engineering leadership, Product Managers, and Retail Operations to translate commercial roadmaps into modular, scalable technical milestones that minimize future technical debt.
• Mentor & Foster Technical Culture: Guide and mentor Senior and Staff Engineers across multiple squads, leading consequential technical decision-making and building an open, high-velocity engineering culture across the Oniverse. Your Story
• Extensive Technical Leadership Experience: 10+ years of software engineering experience designing, scaling, and operating distributed systems, with significant tenure operating as a Principal Engineer or Staff+ technical leader in modern retail tech environments.
• Deep Retail Domain Mastery: Proven track record architecting core retail domain platforms, specifically high-throughput POS solutions, global payment processor integrations, multi-country fiscalization frameworks, and store replenishment flows.
• Software Engineering & Architectural Craft: Mastery of modern cloud-native architectures (microservices, event-driven designs with Kafka or similar, REST/GraphQL APIs, distributed storage) and strong proficiency in modern languages, emphasizing resilient system design over vendor package configuration.
• Decoupled Integration & Composable Commerce: Demonstrated success integrating distributed retail touchpoints with enterprise backbones (ERP, OMS, CRM) via resilient asynchronous integration layers, deprecating legacy monoliths without business disruption.
• Pragmatic, High-Impact Decision Making: Demonstrated ability to drive complex, consequential architectural trade-offs across multiple cross-functional teams, balancing long-term technical vision with immediate business outcomes.
• Inspiring Mentorship & Influence: Strong communicator who articulates complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders alike, with a passionate track record of mentoring senior engineers and raising the hiring bar. Your Team We power the in-store experience. The Technology team supports On's stores with cutting-edge digital tools. For us, a personalized shopping experience goes hand-in-hand with efficiency. Tech makes it happen. So, we're after innovative solutions — from point-of-sale systems to customer engagement platforms — all for the wow.