About the Role
You’re the architecture point of contact for Product-to-Market — the entire pipeline from consumer insights and line planning through sourcing, manufacturing, inventory, pricing, and store delivery. That’s not an org chart line on a slide. That’s the revenue engine of four global brands: Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and Athleta.
You will own the architecture decisions that determine whether these brands can move faster, source smarter, price dynamically, and get product to the right place at the right time. You’re accountable for translating what the business needs into technology choices that actually work— and for killing the ones that don’t.
This is a hands-on architecture role inside a transformation. Not a governance seat. Not an advisory board. You are in the work.
What You'll Do
• Lead product selection and vendor evaluation — we’re actively rationalizing a
complex landscape of legacy and SaaS platforms across PLM, sourcing, inventory
management, merchandising, pricing, and franchise. You’ll run the methodology,
facilitate cross-functional evaluation teams, build scorecards, present trade-off analyses,
and drive decisions. Build vs. buy is a conversation you have weekly, not annually.
• Own the end-to-end solution architecture for your P2M domains — consumer
insights, assortment/line planning, digital collaboration (merchants ↔ designers ↔
vendors), product design, MFP/buy planning, costing, sourcing, PO tracking, inventory
visibility, replenishment, pricing optimization, and store planning. You design the target
state. You sequence the migration. You hold engineering accountable to the
architecture.
• Drive AI and automation adoption where it actually creates value — not where it
sounds good in a deck. AI-driven inventory forecasting, attribute-based buy models,
dynamic pricing, size localization, speed-to-market acceleration. You identify the high-
value use cases, ensure responsible and compliant implementation, and execute in
alignment with our enterprise AI strategy and Office of AI direction.
• Integrate across the enterprise — your domains don’t exist in isolation. Inventory
visibility feeds eCommerce. Pricing engines drive promotions across channels. Sourcing
data flows through supply chain. You design integration patterns that make systems
work cohesively, not just coexist.
• Create architecture artifacts that drive decisions — CDDs, SDDs, impact
assessments, vendor analyses, technology roadmaps. These aren’t shelf-ware. They’re
the documents that move $50M+ investment decisions through our stage-gate process.
• Govern without being the governance police — you participate in design reviews,
approvals, standards discussions, and technology evaluations. But the posture is
enablement, not gatekeeping. You make teams faster by giving them clarity, not slower
by giving them process.
• Mentor and build capability — you’re surrounded by engineers, product managers,
and junior architects. Share what you know. Build the architectural maturity of the teams
around you.
Who You Are
• You’ve been in the trenches of a real technology transformation — not a migration, not a “modernization” that was really just a re-hosting. An actual business and technology transformation where legacy systems got replaced, business processes got redesigned, and you had to fight through organizational resistance to make it happen.
• You know P2M / retail operations cold — PLM, merchandising, sourcing, inventory management, pricing, supply chain adjacency. You’ve architected in these domains. You understand the business processes, the vendor landscape, and where the technology actually matters.
• You can hold your own in a room with business leaders, data scientists, and
engineering leadership — and adjust your communication for each audience without losing substance. You translate architecture into business impact and business requirements into architecture decisions.
• You’ve led vendor evaluations with real stakes — not theoretical exercises. Multi-vendor, multi-million-dollar platform decisions where you owned the recommendation and stood behind it.
• You’re comfortable with conflict — architecture decisions create winners and losers. Vendors push back. Engineering teams resist change. Product managers want everything yesterday. You navigate this without avoiding the hard conversations.
• You’ve managed offshore teams and MSPs — and you know the difference between delegating effectively and throwing work over the wall.
• You’re current on AI/ML, composable architecture, and the modern SaaS
landscape — not because you read about it, but because you’ve evaluated, selected, and implemented these technologies in production.
Retail/apparel experience is a strong plus but not a gate. If you’ve done this in CPG, manufacturing, or any complex product-driven business, the translation is straightforward.
