As a member of the IT Management Team, you are responsible for managing, developing, and leading a team of employees. Your role includes leading the specific functional responsibilities of your team, which involves overseeing team performance and deliverables. However, your role as a leader within our organization requires more than the management of resources and day-to-day operations. As a steward of the company, you are charged with the development and execution of your team's strategic vision and plan and ensuring that your team's actions align with the larger goals of the company and the IT Division.
The Merchandising Platform and Operations Manager position, is a highly visible role. This manager will build strong relationships within Merchandising, Cloud Tech, Infrastructure Services and Security to help enable the growth and maturity of Merchandising operations. The role will manage a team responsible for incident response, system stability, optimization, execution, and performance. The successful candidate will demonstrate strong technical aptitude in DevOps practices, Cloud Infrastructure (Azure/GCP/IBM) and Platform Engineering, Monitoring and Alerting, and have a demonstrated ability to lead teams that operate in an ambiguous, fast-paced environment yet deliver against aggressive deadlines.
This area is responsible for monitoring, supporting and maintaining the overall Merchandising cloud and on-prem ecosystems, focusing on the health and operation of Infrastructure areas, Platforms, and DevOps processes in the non-production and production environments. This area is also responsible for ensuring security and compliance of the Merchandising Platforms with Merchandising established standards and Architecture governance, as well as with Costco policies, regulations and industry frameworks. This is a highly collaborative team within Merchandising, as well as with other areas of IT, to ensure minimal disruption to our members and our business. This team is responsible for developing operational standards, training, monitoring and support strategies for the Merchandising Platform ecosystem.
As the primary conduit between your employees and upper leadership, your role in communicating and modeling the values and guiding principles of our company culture is of vital importance. All members of IT Management should strive to consciously and consistently foster a culture of engagement, trust, and "open door" communication.
Job Duties/Essential Functions
• INTEGRITY: When achieving benchmarks and goals, use methods/strategies that are consistent with the Code of Ethics and the Standard of Ethics for Managers and Supervisors. Always leads by example. Appropriately handles employee concerns and follows through to resolution.
• MEMBER SERVICE: Provides and ensures staff provides an exceptional member experience.
• ADMINISTRATION: Ensures proper department coverage (writing schedule and break aids if needed). Understands department budget, able to research and explain budget variances.
• MANAGING PERFORMANCE: Coaches and mentors employees to provide support and guidance. Has regular open and honest conversations with employees to discuss work performance and career development. Identifies learning opportunities to strengthen employee knowledge, skill and ability.
• COMMUNICATION: Regularly shares information with employees and colleagues via meetings and one-on-one conversations. Successfully navigates difficult conversations with employees, members, and suppliers. Listens, expresses empathy and adapts to get points across. Addresses issues immediately to ensure a timely resolution and to avoid escalating the situation. Consistently demonstrates business knowledge during interactions with senior management.
• SELF-MANAGEMENT: Demonstrates sound judgment, taking a partner when necessary. Ability to maintain self-control in the face of hostility or provocation or in intense, hectic situations.
• INCLUSION: Encourages different approaches and ideas to work and to accomplish goals. Seeks employee input. Takes the time to get to know or reach out to candidates who show potential that may not come forward on their own.
• COMPLIANCE AND SAFETY: Takes measures to ensure employee and member information is kept confidential and adheres to IS security policy.
• Supports a healthy and cooperative team dynamic by fostering a work environment based on collaboration, openness, and trust.
• Sets clear performance expectations and provides thoughtful and timely coaching and feedback to ensure department, business and company procedures and standards are met. Conducts regular 1:1's and yearly performance reviews.
• Encourages and models a culture of learning and professional development by providing regular training and professional development opportunities.
• Responds to employee concerns using problem-solving skills, tact, and discretion in accordance with the Costco Employee Agreement and other applicable regulations.
• Demonstrates strong collaboration skills to advance cross-functional projects, resourcing needs, and resolution to issues. Operates with a high sense of urgency.
• Develops and maintains positive working relationships with business customers - demonstrating value through consistent and repeatable delivery of services and recommendations.
• Leads a team that is able to balance and deliver on a strategic Platform approach while meeting Costco's Merchandising business needs.
• Maintains up-to-date knowledge on Platform design/operation, Azure and Infrastructure industry trends and standards.
• Ensures that the Merchandising prod and non-prod environments are stable and reliable.
• Demonstrates an understanding of how DevSecOps is implemented, sustained and improved upon in a critical business area.
• Continual auditing of environments against Merch architectural patterns.
• Performs Azure costing and optimization reviews.
• Executes against approved projects and meets dates in support of scheduled application releases.
• Applies new Operating Model principles to Agile organization.
• Captures and prioritizes backlog of technical debt resulting from program integration activities.
• Identifies, communicates, and manages dependencies that support successful delivery of Merchandising application environments.
• This is a full-time management/leadership position (45 hours per week).
• Regular and reliable workplace attendance at your assigned location.
Ability to operate vehicles, equipment or machinery.
• Computer, phone, printer, copier, fax
Non-Essential Functions
• Assists in other areas of the department as necessary.
• Assists in other areas of the company as necessary.
Ability to operate vehicles, equipment or machinery.
• Same as essential functions
Experience, Skills, Education & Licenses/Certifications
Required:
• 3 years technical management experience.
• 3 years technical lead experience over production environments.
• 2 years experience with DevOps implementation, security, governance and best practices.
• Computer Science, Business, or related degree and/or professional certification(s)
• Azure applications, services, and infrastructure environment knowledge and experience.
• Hands on experience with monitoring tools such as Dynatrace or Azure Monitor.
• Familiarity with cloud architecture, services and design concepts.
• Strong leadership and team-building skills; ability to focus various work streams at the same time.
• Must be detail oriented and thorough, with ability to think "big picture" and understand the key trends and goals that drive Costco's Merchandising business.
• Proven ability to make sound decisions in an environment with frequent change.
• Innovative, creative and possesses a passion for excellence.
• Strong interpersonal skills; able to manage people at varying skill levels and work with people at all management levels.
• Strong communication skills, both oral and written.
• Detail oriented and possess strong problem-solving skills.
• Excellent organizational and planning skills, with experience building strategic and tactical plans.
• Able to support off-hours work as required; including weekends, holidays, and 24/7 on call responsibilities on a rotational basis.
• HIPAA Training and Supervisors Orientation (within 30 days of hire); Leadership Development 101 (within one year); Costco Pay Policies (within 90 days of promotion).
Recommended:
• Experience in managing a production and non-production Azure or GCP cloud infrastructure
• Experience in effectively managing environment support and partnerships with vendors and SAAS providers
• Experience in environment automation
• Experience in effectively implementing a production environment monitoring and support strategy
• Proficient in Google Workspace applications, including Sheets, Docs, Slides, and Gmail
• Successful internal candidates will have spent one year or more on their current team
• Successful internal individual contributor candidates will have been marked as "YES" to "ready/qualified to manage team(s) in Costco IT" on the Manager Readiness Survey by a member of their leadership within the last 12 months.
Other Conditions
• Management will review the Job Analysis for this position prior to a job offer.
Required Documents
• Cover Letter
• Resume
• Last two performance reviews
• Attendance records for current year (Do not include absences covered by paid sick/personal time, FMLA or other protected absences.)
California applicants, please click here to review the Costco Applicant Privacy Notice.
