Principal Software Engineer (Marketing Technology)

ABOUT THE POSITION 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. HOW YOU'LL MAKE A DIFFERENCE Development: Design & Implementation: Lead full stack design and development of marketing technology capabilities — including storefront features, API integrations, event-driven services, and cloud-based backend systems. Own architectural decisions within the squad with high autonomy. Promote reuse, portability, and ease of maintenance across both front-end and back-end layers. Notify dependent teams of material technical or functional changes. Quality and Performance: Establish and manage quality standards across the full stack. Drive test automation at the unit, integration, and end-to-end levels. Uphold high standards of code quality through active peer code review. Troubleshoot bugs, security vulnerabilities, and performance bottlenecks on both client and server. Create and maintain support playbooks. Observability: Lead the squad in monitoring application health, availability, and performance across front-end and back-end systems in production. Implement proactive alerting. Partner with peers across squads to diagnose cross-system issues. Technical Advancement: Apply senior-level DevOps practices to advance the squad's technical foundation. Champion solutions that are modern, simple, and secure. Stay current across the evolving web, cloud, and MarTech platform landscape. Innovation: Identify and drive proof-of-concept work to validate new patterns or platforms. Make data-informed recommendations. Participate in enterprise-level evaluation of strategic tools. Product Backlog & Roadmap Input: Shape the squad's technical backlog. Break down large epics into well-scoped, iterable stories with clear acceptance criteria. Partner with Product Managers to influence prioritization and surface technical dependencies. Generate backlog items for tech debt, non-functional requirements, and platform modernization. Agile Delivery: Actively participate in stand-up, refinement, planning, review, and retrospectives. Lead the squad through blockers. Drive continuous improvement and champion collaborative practices such as pair programming. Architecture & Design: Maintain deep understanding of the Marketing Technology stack and its integration points — including commerce platforms, messaging and CRM systems, data layers, and cloud infrastructure. Partner with Solution Architects to adopt and adapt enterprise patterns. Maintain architecture documentation for owned capabilities. Mentoring/Team Development: Mentor GCC engineers within and across squads. Create learning opportunities and build a strong engineering culture as a founding senior member of the GCC India team. Actively participate in communities of practice. Cross-Timezone Collaboration: Serve as the senior technical point of contact during India business hours. Partner effectively with PDX-based product, architecture, and peer engineering teams on design, prioritization, and delivery. YOU ARE A true full stack engineer comfortable owning features end-to-end from browser to cloud and bringing architectural judgment to both layers without being constrained to either. A technical leader who sets standards, raises the bar, and brings others along — especially in a new team environment where culture and practices are still being shaped. Genuinely curious - you ask why, not just how. You stay current on the evolving technology landscape not because you must, but because you want to, and you bring that energy to your squad. An exceptional communicator, able to explain complex technical decisions clearly and concisely to both technical peers and non-technical stakeholders — in writing and verbally — across cultures and time zones. You default to over-communication, not under. Globally minded, with firsthand experience working across distributed, cross-cultural teams. You understand the discipline, empathy, and intentionality required to make a geographically separated team feel like one team. Customer-obsessed, framing technical decisions through the lens of consumer experience and business outcomes. Pragmatic and hands-on, comfortable in both strategic architecture discussions and deep implementation work. YOU HAVE Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience. 8+ years of professional software engineering experience. Demonstrated full stack engineering expertise — significant professional experience on both client-side and server-side, not primarily one or the other: Front end: JavaScript (ES6+), TypeScript, React or similar modern framework, HTML5, CSS3/Sass, responsive and accessible web development Back end: Node.js, RESTful API design, microservices or service-oriented architecture, event-driven patterns Experience with cloud platforms — AWS and/or Azure — including serverless functions, managed services, API gateway, messaging/eventing, and infrastructure-as-code concepts. Experience integrating with e-commerce or marketing technology platforms (Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Braze, Zeta, Adobe Experience Platform, or similar). Solid CI/CD and DevOps practices: automated testing, deployment pipelines, monitoring and observability tooling. Experience with data layer design and how front-end events feed analytics, personalization, and marketing activation systems. Proven track record in agile delivery — backlog ownership, story decomposition, and iterative delivery in a cross-functional squad. Demonstrated experience working on globally distributed teams — with peers, stakeholders, or leadership based in a different country or region. Experience in an India GCC, offshore delivery model, or multinational organization is strongly preferred. Experience with Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC) — SFRA, OCAPI/SCAPI, or Composable Storefront / PWA Kit. Strong written and verbal English communication skills, including the ability to write clear technical documentation, async updates, and architectural decision records that remote teammates can act on independently. Familiarity with tag management platforms (Adobe Launch / Adobe Tags) and how behavioral data flows into marketing systems. Background in consumer identity, authentication, or consent management. #LI-SA1 #Hybrid This job description is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of duties and responsibilities, but constitutes a general definition of the position's scope and function in the company. Columbia is different. As a global apparel and footwear company with over 80 years of being ourselves and not apologizing for it, we've seen a lot and done a lot. But our motto remains: "It's perfect. now make it better." Learn more about how you can help us shape the next 80 years here.