ARCHITECT, DATA ENGINEERING

Key Skills

Java Programming, Python Programming, MongoDB, Database, SQL, Agile methodologies, DevOps, AWS, PowerBI, Apache Hadoop, Scala Programming, Machine learning techniques, Data science techniques, Alteryx, NoSQL, QlikView, Tableau, Docker, Kubernetes-K8s, R Programming, MicroStrategy, DataOps, Containerization

Job Description

Ralph Lauren Corporation (NYSE:RL) is a global leader in the design, marketing and distribution of premium lifestyle products in five categories: apparel, accessories, home, fragrances, and hospitality. For more than 50 years, Ralph Lauren's reputation and distinctive image have been consistently developed across an expanding number of products, brands and international markets. The Company's brand names, which include Ralph Lauren, Ralph Lauren Collection, Ralph Lauren Purple Label, Polo Ralph Lauren, Double RL, Lauren Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren Children, Chaps, among others, constitute one of the world's most widely recognized families of consumer brands.

At Ralph Lauren, we unite and inspire the communities within our company as well as those in which we serve by amplifying voices and perspectives to create a culture of belonging, ensuring inclusion, and fairness for all. We foster a culture of inclusion through: Talent, Education & Communication, Employee Groups and Celebration.

Position Overview

The Ralph Lauren Corporation, a global leader in luxury fashion and design, is building advanced analytics capabilities to support its Global business in North America, EMEA, and APAC. Our Analytics Team is focused on building high-quality technology solutions to enhance the business & customer experience across channels and geographies.

The Analytics Solutions Architect is an emerging role in Ralph Lauren’s Analytics team and will play a pivotal role in delivering insights for the most critical data and analytics initiatives for Ralph Lauren.

Based in Nutley, NJ, this Data Engineering Architect will work with the Global Analytics team to build, maintain, and optimize data pipelines for key data and analytics consumers including business and data analysts and data scientists covering our digital and physical channels and value chain across all geographies. The Data Engineering Architect will collaborate with line of business users, business analysts, data analysts and data scientists on models and algorithms to deliver analytics insights and use cases.

The Data Engineering Architect will leverage analytical, visualization, and data engineering skills to solve problems, unlock opportunities and create new insights. They will identify and explore internal and external data sets. They will guarantee compliance with data governance and data security requirements while creating, improving, and operationalizing integrated and reusable data pipelines. This would enable faster data access, integrated data reuse and vastly improved time-to-solution for Ralph Lauren’s data and analytics initiatives.

This role will require both creative and collaborative working with IT and the wider business. It will involve evangelizing effective data management practices and promoting better understanding of data and analytics. The Analytics Solutions Architect will also be tasked with working with key business stakeholders, IT experts and subject-matter experts to plan and deliver optimal analytics and data science solutions.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities

Educate and train: The Analytics Solutions Architect should be curious and knowledgeable about new data initiatives and how to address them. This includes applying their data and/or domain understanding in addressing new requirements. They will also be responsible for proposing appropriate (and innovative) data analysis and visualization techniques. They will be required to train counterparts such as data scientists, data analysts, LOB users or any data consumers in analysis and visualization techniques, which make it easier for them to integrate and consume the data they need for their own use cases.Drive Automation through effective metadata management: Design or adopt solutions and frameworks using innovative and modern tools, techniques and architectures to partially or completely automate the most-common, repeatable and tedious data preparation and integration tasks in order to minimize manual and error-prone processes and improve productivity. 

Advance the technology architecture for analytics: Continuously evaluate the suitability of our analytics technology environment – including tools, frameworks, and processes – to satisfy our current and future business needs. Understand the technology landscape in the broader retail industry and propose advancements to our roadmap.

Build data pipelines: Assist data engineers to architect data pipelines that will provision high quality data ready for analysis. This includes ingestion, exploration, modeling, and curation of high value data.

Drive delivery of solutions in an Agile delivery model: Document requirements and solution design as stories that can be completed within a sprint. Work as part of the sprint team to ensure requirements and design are well understood and achieve the expected value.

Design analytics solutions to the problems faced by stakeholders: Provide thought leadership to define creative solutions to problems that balance speed of execution with the ability to create sustainable wins. Understand the various sources of data, technical components of the architecture, and best practices in the industry to solve problems with speed. Ensure the design is well understood and embraced by team members.

Develop strong partnerships with key line of business stakeholders: Utilize expertise on Ralph Lauren’s data and industry best practices to develop strong partnership with key stakeholders across business units in order to expand the analytics capabilities of the organization. The Analytics Solutions Architect will understand the needs of stakeholders as well as push the organization to adopt new ways of analyzing and visualizing data.

Experience, Skills & Knowledge

• The ideal candidate will have a combination of analytical skills, data governance skills, IT skills and Retail industry knowledge with a technical or computer science degree.
• At least 8 or more years of relevant work experience in analytical or business intelligence disciplines including data analysis, visualization, integration, modeling, etc.
• At least 3 years of experience working in cross-functional teams and collaborating with business stakeholders in Retail in support of a departmental and/or multi-departmental analytics initiative.
• Deep Retail Industry knowledge or previous experience working in the business would be a plus.
• Strong experience with analytical methods including regression, forecasting, time series, cluster analysis, classification, etc. Experience with machine learning and AI would be a plus. 
• Strong experience with advanced analytics tools for Object-oriented/object function scripting using languages such as R, Python, Scala, or similar.
• Strong experience with popular database programming languages including SQL, PL/SQL, etc. for relational databases and on NoSQL/Hadoop oriented databases like MongoDB, Cassandra, etc for nonrelational databases.
• Strong experience working with popular data discovery, analytics and BI software tools like MicroStrategy, Tableau, Qlik, PowerBI and others for semantic-layer-based data discovery. Certification in one more of these tools would be a plus. 
• Strong experience in working with data science teams in refining and optimizing data science and machine learning models and algorithms.
• Basic understanding of popular open-source and commercial data science platforms such as Python, R, KNIME, Alteryx, others are a strong plus.
• Basic experience in working with data governance, data quality, and data security teams and specifically and privacy and security officers in moving data pipelines into production with appropriate data quality, governance and security standards and certification.
• Demonstrated ability to work across multiple deployment environments including cloud, on-premises and hybrid, multiple operating systems and through containerization techniques such as Docker, Kubernetes, AWS Elastic Container Service and others.
• Adept in agile methodologies and capable of applying DevOps and increasingly DataOps principles to data pipelines to improve the communication, integration, reuse and automation of data flows between data managers and consumers across an organization
• Strong experience supporting and working with cross-functional teams in a dynamic business environment.
• Required to be highly creative and collaborative. An ideal candidate would be expected to collaborate with both the business and IT teams to define the business problem, refine the requirements, and design and develop data deliverables accordingly. The successful candidate will also be required to have regular discussions with data consumers on optimally refining the data pipelines developed in nonproduction environments and deploying them in production.
• Required to have the accessibility and ability to interface with, and gain the respect of, stakeholders at all levels and roles within the company.
• Is a confident, energetic self-starter, with strong interpersonal skills.
• Has good judgment, a sense of urgency and has demonstrated commitment to high standards of ethics, regulatory compliance, customer service and business integrity.