Summary

What is a Principal Engineer @ Advantage Solutions

Your passion for technology and hunger for digital transformation and innovation will help shape the future of sales and marketing within the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) space for years to come. In your daily interactions, you will provide essential strategic and day-to-day leadership across the organization, working with teams of engineers and product owners, aligning cross-functional projects, and ensuring fiscal and technical alignment with the organization.

In this model, a Principal Engineer is a strategic role that directly collaborates with the Product Owners, Engineering Leads, and other key partners to define a target state vision and technical roadmap for the business domain they are responsible, including its end-to-end architecture while ensuring adherence to standards and strategic initiatives.

A successful Principal Engineer @ Advantage Solutions manifests holistic wisdom of up- and down-stream impacts of technology solutions and trends to guide the development of future products and patterns. With that, a Principal Engineer @ Advantage Solutions is a top-tier engineer – a visionary leader and a hands-on builder – with experience making high-level design choices, framing technical standards, and re-enforcing frameworks, patterns, and principles, including tools, software, and engineering execution standards.

To be effective, a Principal Engineer @ Advantage Solutions develops expertise within their domain (understanding capabilities, strong problem-solving skills, etc.), creates a roadmap for their systems, and communicates that plan to others within the organization. However, more than technical knowledge is required, as a Principal Engineer @ Advantage Solutions must also have the soft skills to manage and positively influence projects and people.

The focus area for this role will be Advantage Commercial, with a hyper-focus on Consumer packaged goods (CPG) Execution, including all actions a brand takes to get to the final step of the buyer’s journey: purchase.

A Principal Engineer @ Advantage Solutions is a highly technical individual contributor responsible for driving activities in the following two distinct but related areas.

• Proactively identify opportunities to reuse or generalize existing capabilities, services, and product features. At the same time, avoiding duplication of effort by encouraging collaboration.
• A proven track record of delivering enterprise-scale engineering transformation projects, ideally within the CPG market, using contemporary technologies and methodologies such as:
• Digital Customer Experience platforms / CRM platforms
• E-commerce Platforms
• CMS, Search, PIM, DAM, OMS
• DevSecOps/Automation (CI/CD) for large-scale delivery
• Architecture and design knowledge of API gateways, Microservices, Integrations, IaC, and Data platforms
• Cloud platform architectures (Azure)
• Quality Engineering

Summary

• Tasks often involve investigating unique and complex problems.
• Responsible for making decisions and recommendations that are recognized as authoritative and have an essential impact on complete architectural design activities.
• Frequently involved in the conceptual stage of the design phase of a project and accepts complete responsibility for the architectural design elements of the entire project.
• Principal Engineers must keep themselves well-versed in new technology and industry trends.
• Responsible for prioritizing ever-changing tasks and scopes while ensuring that schedules and deadlines are met.
• Evaluate project costs and aid in crafting budgets for new projects.
• Providing the development team with architectural blueprints to follow.
• Partner with technology vendors and consultants to identify opportunities to innovate.

Responsibilities for Principal Architect @ Advantage Intelligence

• Primary Responsibilities:
• Collaborating with various stakeholders to determine application requirements
• Play a central role in technical, business, and organizational contributions affecting the sub-department/department
• Creating high-level product specifications and design documents (conceptual and physical diagrams)
• Exert technical influence over multiple teams, increasing their productivity and effectiveness by sharing your deep knowledge and experience
• Providing the development team with architectural blueprints to follow
• Ensure the security of all applications/software systems
• Meet financial objectives by forecasting requirements, preparing budgets, scheduling expenditures, analyzing variances, and initiating corrective actions
• Actively seek ways to improve business applications/software processes and interactions
• Enhance our cloud capability by creating and implementing cloud application patterns
• Work closely with lead architects and engineers to create and maintain architectural templates, build/operational documents, and automation playbooks
• Define API features, expected security setup, scalability, and monetization.
• Secondary Responsibilities:
• Research and properly evaluate sources of information to determine possible limitations in reliability or usability
• Help other development and engineering teams resolve application-to-platform integration issues for Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) services
• Maintain domain knowledge by participating in educational opportunities, reading professional publications, and participating in professional organizations
• Coach and mentor engineering teams to raise collective technical expertise
• Testing the final product to ensure it is entirely functional and meets requirements
• Use a proactive approach to common challenges and continually researching best practices in coding

Qualifications / Skills / Requirements

• Outstanding collaboration and communication skills are essential
• 10+ years of hands-on experience in architecting and designing solutions using at least three disciplines: cloud architecture, software development, data platform integration, business processes and capabilities, focusing on scalability, security, performance, and cost to serve
• 10+ years of experience in applying architecture patterns that cover application, data, events, and API-led design concepts enabling transaction flow for scenarios such as application to application, business to business (B2B), direct to consumer (B2C), digital integration, devices, and things
• 10+ yrs. Experience working on large-scale application projects
• 10+ yrs. Exposure to cloud-managed services, serverless technology, and microservices like Function-as-a-Service, Containers, and managed databases
• 10+ yrs. Experience developing applications/software utilizing various coding languages, including Python, .Net, Java, JavaScript/React, and more
• 10+ yrs. Experience overseeing customized development of processes for multiple projects simultaneously
• 10+ yrs. Experience designing secure applications systems based upon industry specifications
• Demonstrated deep knowledge of web applications, webhook and API development, cybersecurity, and open-source technologies
• Demonstrate a track record of leading within complex organizations requiring strong influence management skills - the ability to work cooperatively at all levels in a matrix environment

Responsibilities

The Company is one of North America’s leading sales and marketing agencies specializing in outsourced sales, merchandising, category management and marketing services to manufacturers, suppliers and producers of food products and consumer packaged goods. The Company services a variety of trade channels including grocery, mass merchandise, specialty, convenience, drug, dollar, club, hardware, consumer electronics and home centers. We bridge the gap between manufacturers and retailers, providing consumers access to the best products available in the marketplace today.

Essential Job Duties and Responsibilities

Requirements Gathering & Planning

• Regularly meet with stakeholders and users to determine requirements and demo development progress. Create wireframes and mockups, architect systems and data models, and plan a development roadmap.

Software Development

• Code back-end services, controllers, and APIs; front-end views and components; and data models that meet the project’s requirements. Advance the codebase by removing technical debt.

Testing and QA

• Incorporate and improve unit test coverage and generate UI tests to automate testing. Smoke test as needed and perform code reviews to ensure the accuracy and clarity of code.

Customer Service & Support

• Provide post-release training, troubleshooting, and ad-hoc bug fixes. Write and keep technical documents up-to-date.

Personal & Team Growth

• Adopt and advance the team’s best practices and actively contribute new ideas and concepts. Maintain understanding of current technologies and programming practices through continuous education, reading, workshops, and/or groups. Train new software engineers.

Supervisory Responsibilities

Direct Reports

• This position does not have supervisory responsibilities for direct reports

Indirect Reports

• May delegate work of others and provide guidance, direction and mentoring to indirect reports

Travel and/or Driving Requirements

• Travel and Driving are not essential duties or functions of this job

Minimum Qualifications

The following are the minimum job-related qualifications which an individual needs in order to successfully perform the essential duties and responsibilities of the job

Education Level: (Required): Bachelor's Degree or equivalent experience

Field of Study/Area of Experience: Computer Science or other related discipline

10 or more years of experience:

• .NET, C#, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, T-SQL, MVC

Additional experience a plus:

• AngularJS, Azure, Bootstrap, jQuery, REST, SCSS, Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team Services

Skills, Knowledge and Abilities

• Motivated to learn, experiment, and use the latest technologies
• Positive attitude with a desire to solve problems
• Familiar with the stages of the software development lifecycle
• Knowledge of security best practices
• Team player who is comfortable partnering with business departments
• Troubleshooting and debugging skills
• Comfortable shuffling priorities and context switching based on business needs
• Possess a sense of pride and confidence in authored code
• Understand the business domain and proactively suggest features
• Independent worker requiring very little oversight

Environmental & Physical Requirements

Office / Sedentary Requirements

Incumbent must be able to perform the essential functions of the job. Work is performed primarily in an office environment. Typically requires the ability to sit for extended periods of time (66%+ each day), ability to hear the telephone, ability to enter data on a computer and may also require the ability to lift up to 10 pounds.

Additional Information Regarding The Company Job Duties and Job Descriptions

Job duties include additional responsibilities as assigned by one’s supervisor or other manager related to the position/department. This job description is meant to describe the general nature and level of work being performed; it is not intended to be construed as an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required for the position. The Company reserves the right at any time with or without notice to alter or change job responsibilities, reassign or transfer job position or assign additional job responsibilities, subject to applicable law. The Company shall provide reasonable accommodations of known disabilities to enable a qualified applicant or employee to apply for employment, perform the essential functions of the job, or enjoy the benefits and privileges of employment as required by the law.

Any estimate, schedule, or guideline provided to associates in this job description or elsewhere in connection with their jobs is only intended to help describe job duties and for planning purposes. Regardless of any such estimate, schedule, or guideline, associates must always record all time worked for our company (which includes but is not limited to on-site work time in an assigned store, office, or other work location; required waiting time; administrative time; and work-related travel time).

Important Information

The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of work being performed by people assigned to this position. They are not intended to be an exhaustive list of all responsibilities, duties and skills required of associates so classified.

The Company is committed to providing equal opportunity in all employment practices without regard to age, race, color, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, religion, physical or mental disability, or any other category protected by law. As part of this commitment, the Company shall provide reasonable accommodations of known disabilities to enable an applicant or employee to apply for employment, perform the essential functions of the job, or enjoy the benefits and privileges of employment as required by the law.

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