Software Engineering Manager, Advanced Analytics & Personalization
For over a century, The Neiman Marcus Group has stayed focused on serving the unique needs of the luxury market. Today, that commitment is stronger than ever. We have stayed true to the principles of our founders, to be recognized as the premier omni-channel luxury retailer dedicated to providing our customers with distinctive merchandise and superior service. The Neiman Marcus Group is comprised of the Specialty Retail Stores division which includes Neiman Marcus Stores and Bergdorf Goodman and the eCommerce Division. These renowned retailers offer upscale assortments of apparel, accessories, jewelry, beauty and decorative home products to the affluent consumer. The Company operates 41 Neiman Marcus full-line stores in marquee retail locations in major U.S. markets, including U.S. gateway cities that draw customers from all over the world. In addition, we operate 2 Bergdorf Goodman stores in landmark locations on Fifth Avenue in New York City. We also operate, 36 off-price smaller format stores under the brand Last Call catering to an aspirational, price sensitive yet fashion-minded customer and 6 smaller format stores under the brand CUSP catering to a younger customer focused on contemporary fashion. These store operations total more than 6.5 million gross square feet. Our upscale eCommerce retailing operation conducts both print catalog and online operations under the Neiman Marcus, Horchow, Bergdorf Goodman, CUSP and Last Call brand names.
Through our stores and eCommerce business, our goal is to provide our customer with the ability to shop any of our brands "anytime, anywhere, any device." Whether an emphasis on customer service or investing in technology, everything we do is to enhance the customer experience across channels and brands.
Job Summary
We seek top talent to help drive the Advanced Analytics and Personalization capabilities. This is about creating algorithms and methods focused extensively in the areas of creating a single view of the customer across all channels, brands, and devices. Using deep customer interaction history to create a rich psychographic profile that powers the most compelling personalization strategies in omni-channel or seamless retail. We’re building customer insights and personalization strategies that are enabled using the massive computational and storage power of our own large Hadoop cluster. In addition to extensively using Hadoop, cutting-edge technologies: including NoSQL Cassandra, Couchbase, Kafka, Storm, Solr, Node, and Spark are used to enable high-volume, low latency API platform that makes our customer insights actionable. This API platform is utilized by a variety of operational systems in real-time to create a customer experience that is more consistent, personalized, contextual and relevant across all channels, brands and devices.
This role is will focus on execution and operations of Advanced Analytics & Personalization API platforms. We are looking for individuals with strong knowledge of mathematical, statistical and software engineering disciplines. The successful candidate must be highly effective and influential in a matrix structure of functional business areas, building teams and IT sourcing strategies. The successful candidate will be a strong manager who can prioritize well, communicate clearly, and have a consistent track record of delivery, and obsession about the customer experience.
Qualified candidates have extensive experience in a Retail environment (Brick & Mortar or eCommerce), digital marketing organization or Customer Insight Analytics building product roadmaps, deep understanding of the business, customer service orientation, and delivering projects that meet rapidly evolving business needs.
Job Duties
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Engineering excellence. You have at least 5 years of industry experience in a variety of contexts, during which you’ve built insanely scalable, robust, and fault-tolerant systems. You have a solid knowledge of the whole web stack: front-end, back-end, databases, cache layer, HTTP protocol, TCP/IP, Linux, CPU architecture, etc. Bonus points if these systems happen to include Hadoop.
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Bias towards action. You believe that speed and quality aren’t mutually exclusive. You’ve shown good judgment about shipping as fast as possible while still making sure that products are built in a sustainable, responsible way and you’re comfortable making mistakes, provided you learn from them.
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Superior teaching skills. You know that the most important part of your job is setting the team up for success. Through mentoring, teaching, and reviewing, you help other engineers make sound architectural decisions, improve their code quality, and get out of their comfort zone.
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Passion and energy. Because you love what you do, you bring infectious enthusiasm to all your endeavors. You always perform at your absolute best and see new challenges as an opportunity to contribute, make an impact, and grow.
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Commitment. At Neiman Marcus, commitment to customer service and retail excellence permeates everything we do. You care tremendously about delighting our users and ensuring our market and technical leadership is sustained and extended. You are your harshest critic and hold yourself personally accountable, jumping in and taking ownership of problems that might not even be in your team’s scope.
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Hiring prowess. You’re a strong interviewer who constantly raises the bar for excellence. You believe that what seems amazing one day becomes the norm the next day, and that each new hire should significantly improve the team.
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Design and business vision. You help your team understand requirements beyond the written word. Even in the absence of a PM or a designer, you show great attention to the design and product aspect of anything your team ships.
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Strong architecture chops. Must have depth and proficiency with design patterns. You know how to build highly scalable, robust, and fault-tolerant services that support high-volume request scale. You stay up-to-date with the latest architectural trends. You know what not to do because you’ve already made a few mistakes and learned from them.
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Financial Acumen. You’ll be managing a respectably large checkbook and will be expected to build budgets, forecasts and actuals to ensure that our financial responsibilities are being discharged appropriately.
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Vendor Management. We use a blended delivery and operating model that consists of full-time staff and partners. Need to negotiate a complex web of partnerships and relationships. Should be capable of evaluating new provider partnerships and executing a vendor agreement.
Job Requirements
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Define product strategy and roadmap for Customer Insight driven Personalization capabilities in collaboration with multiple stakeholders across IS
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Accountable for the successful delivery of the roadmaps components, ensuring measurements are in place to confirm the realization of benefits
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Reviewing on-going capability development, enhancement requests and working with portfolio management team to sequence the delivery of these appropriately in product roadmaps 12 to 24 months out
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Accountable for overall project/program delivery of development teams and vendors ensuring the successful execution and delivery of capabilities that meet scope, timing, and budget goals
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Partnering with enterprise architects and infrastructure teams to deliver technical innovations in support of emerging business needs and progressing these ideas from concepts to experiments to scaled models with focus on flexibility, reuse, and overarching extensibility
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Managing operational availability, performance and stability of the platform
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Leading application development and support vendor identification, evaluation, and selection to staff project delivery roles that meet delivery standards across quality, throughput, and budgetary/return-on-investment goals from both internal and external teams
Preferred Qualifications:
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Solid understanding of Big Data (Hadoop), NoSQL software architectures and Restful APIs especially in the personalization or digital marketing domain
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Proven and strong experience working on customer insights and analytics across retail, digital marketing or other business to consumer organizations
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Strong experience working in breadth of cutting edge technologies to help come up with the right technical architecture for emerging personalization needs
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Prior experience in working with organizational change management/leadership and process change management.
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Strong experience evaluating vendors and products both technically as well as functionally
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Demonstrate excellent communication skills with the ability to synthesize and explain complex technology terms and stories across the organization to build credible relationships.
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Have the ability to influence, connect and collaborate with a variety of groups and personalities.
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Strong analytical, prioritizing, interpersonal, problem-solving, budgeting, project management (from conception to completion) skills leading various IT lifecycle initiatives in a fast-paced and ever changing environment.
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Takes ownership and responsibility for actions, behaviors and contributions.
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Flexible and Strong leader with an ability to inspire and motivate self and others to high performance, willing to roll up his/her sleeves to move the team and company forward.
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Ability to apply the right SDLC methodology (Agile, Waterfall, Rapid Prototyping) to execute projects. Effective application of agile software development methodology.
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Strong knowledge of DevOps, building monitoring and operations capabilities for 24/7 operations
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Bachelors Degree required (technical or business undergrad degree a plus)
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Prior experience with Agile software development methodologies is a must
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2+ years’ Experience at a manager level or above delivering technology capabilities for a multi-national company with annual budgetary responsibilities
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3+ years leading teams on a project level basis; formal managerial experience preferred but not required.
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5+ years of software engineering with projects of increasing scope, scale and complexity
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2+ years’ Experience managing third party vendor relationships
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7+ years of IT systems experience in one or more of the following areas, with demonstrated progression of responsibilities:
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Application delivery
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Experience building capabilities using Big Data or NoSQL technologies
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Software product management
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IT/system product design and product strategy
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Business process reengineering
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Organizational development