Principal Engineer - Retail

About the Role

The role charts the architectural vision and technical strategy for On's global physical and omnichannel retail systems. Reporting to the Senior Director of Commercial Technology, it leads the evolution of high-scale, resilient platforms across Point of Sale, digital payments, fiscalisation, and omnichannel store operations. It champions modern software engineering principles and scalable distributed systems to support seamless athlete and runner experiences worldwide. The role sits within the Technology team, which supports On's stores with digital tools and aims to pair personalised shopping experiences with efficiency.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and drive the multi-year architecture north star for On's global retail ecosystem, designing decoupled, event-driven architectures across next-generation POS, payment gateways, omnichannel services, and store operational platforms.
• Act as On's foremost authority in retail engineering, establishing resilient technical solutions for real-time payments, international fiscalisation compliance, offline-first reliability, inventory replenishment, and clienteling touchpoints.
• Set high standards for distributed systems design, data consistency, and code quality across teams, prioritising bespoke, cloud-native engineering and decoupled services over monolithic or configuration-only enterprise tools.
• Champion an operational excellence mindset across global retail infrastructure, defining robust SLOs, observability standards (distributed tracing, telemetry), disaster recovery, and peak-trading launch preparedness.
• Partner with senior engineering leadership, Product Managers, and Retail Operations to translate commercial roadmaps into modular, scalable technical milestones that minimise future technical debt.
• 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.

Required Experience & Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience designing, scaling, and operating distributed systems.
• Significant tenure operating as a Principal Engineer or Staff+ technical leader in modern retail tech environments.
• Proven track record architecting core retail domain platforms, specifically high-throughput POS solutions, global payment processor integrations, multi-country fiscalisation frameworks, and store replenishment flows.
• Mastery of modern cloud-native architectures (microservices, event-driven designs with Kafka or similar, REST/GraphQL APIs, distributed storage).
• Strong proficiency in modern languages, emphasising resilient system design over vendor package configuration.
• Demonstrated success integrating distributed retail touchpoints with enterprise backbones (ERP, OMS, CRM) via resilient asynchronous integration layers, deprecating legacy monoliths without business disruption.
• Demonstrated ability to drive complex, consequential architectural trade-offs across multiple cross-functional teams, balancing long-term technical vision with immediate business outcomes.
• Strong communicator who articulates complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders alike.
• Passionate track record of mentoring senior engineers and raising the hiring bar.