Senior Solutions Data Engineer, GPS

At Nike’s Global Places & Services (GPS) organization, we design and bring to life physical environments and experiences for Nike and the athlete* in more than 100 cities around the world. We work every day to make location a competitive advantage by delivering against our key GPS capabilities: location, physical environments, events, sport, nutrition and mobility.

WHO YOU’LL WORK WITH

The GPS Solutions team is part of the larger GPS Intelligence team (GPSi). GPSi leverages systems, research, analytics and key partnerships across Nike and industries to drive operations and optimization of the real estate portfolio as well as efficiency and effectiveness across our services delivery. Being part of GPSI enables this role to sit with teammates that are process and transactional technology subject matter experts along with analysts, data scientists and researchers that will utilize the solutions this role will deliver. 

WHO WE ARE LOOKING FOR

We’re looking for a Senior Solutions Data Engineer to join the GPS Solutions team to drive and deploy governed technology solutions to empower GPS Capabilities. These solutions will focus on the design, development and management of data products and data sets.

We are looking for a senior level professional with a strong analysis and engineering background to design, develop and deliver data product solutions to enable consumption of location-based, governed data to GPS and the Nike Enterprise. You are an independent thinker that can bridge the gap between users of data and your fellow technology delivery teammates, essentially being able to speak two languages.

You seek opportunities to improve or define engineering delivery processes and have the adaptability to flex into different software development lifecycles (SDLCs).  You are passionate about data solutions, specifically on concepts regarding data/lake houses, data lakes, big data, and data visualization. You seek to learn about industry practices and concepts and how to bring those back to your work in constructive and effective ways. 

Knowing that you will be growing into a GPS data product subject matter expert, you are comfortable working across varied functional teams to understand data needs, clarify use of said data needs, and delivering data product solutions to meet said needs. You are an individual that values attention to detail and depth of knowledge in your space, working to master tactical ‘hands-on’ engineering development delivery while wanting to learn and develop skills for solution management.

You appreciate the complexities associated with processes and systems that feed into your data products and work to provide feedback on those processes and systems to contribute to the overall governance models of GPS data.  In this role you will be responsible for technical engineering delivery of location related data that will drive meaningful and actionable insights tied to optimizing NIKE’s global physical real estate portfolio.

You have strong communication skills, able to lead meetings and clarify ambiguous situations. You are comfortable providing guidance to teammates, teaching others, and being part of engineering squads comprised of both fellow Nike team members as well as vendor partners. You understand and appreciate the importance of creating connections and networks across partner Nike functions, such as Nike Technology, to ensure consistent and optimized design, development and coding practices. 

Skillsets/Experience you bring:

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent combination of education, experience or training
• 5+ years of experience working as an application engineer focused on data product engineering (including experience with analytics technologies such as Snowflake and Databricks and cloud technologies such as AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Strong knowledge of programming languages such as SQL, Java, Python, PySpark.
• Strong data profiling, analysis and data modeling skills.
• Solid understanding of modern data product solution and platform architecture, including egress/ingress methodologies and data product consumption patterns.
• Proficient in DevOps practices, including continuous integration / continuous delivery, automated testing, security administration, and batch orchestration to ensure streamlined and efficient data product development, deployment and serviceability processes.
• Proficient in Agile methodologies and best practices, including Scrum and Kanban.
• Strong project management acumen, with the ability to effectively plan, execute, monitor, and control engineering delivery in a structured manner.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, with a wanting to mentor, coordinate, and guide teams while collaborating with both business and technical audiences.
• Ability to breakdown technical concepts to simplified ‘business speak’ for different audiences.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, highly matrixed organizational environment, with globally distributed and diverse teams, excelling in team-oriented roles that rely on the ability to collaborate with others.
• Self-directed, comfortable working in ambiguous environments, and capable of building positive relationships across product management, architecture, and engineering teams while influencing decisions and changes across loosely coupled teams.

WHAT YOU’LL WORK ON

If this is you, you’ll be working with the teammates across GPS (and Nike) to propel analytics through robust data comprehension, solution requirements, source to target system mappings, data modeling and solution design, development and delivery.

Working within an engineering squad(s), you will be responsible for taking requirements and delivering solutions, focused on a Databricks platform. Solution delivery will be comprised of gathering requirements (at times partnering with a business systems analyst), understanding and contributing to platform and solution architecture (think system ecosystem landscape) and data modeling, as well as owning and delivering data source development (extract), ingress (transform), and object development and loading (load). You will focus on standardizing patterns when possible and will be a part of both project and production support work. You will be a conduit to our Nike Technology teammates, networking with appropriate teams to understand best practices and schools of thought.

In this role, you will build data product solutions that will be used globally and will interact with global teammates, learning how to translate business needs to technology features.  While your primary partners and stakeholders will be on global based teams, there will be times when interaction with regional teammates will be required.  You will collaborate with Nike business partners in Technology, Security, HR and Legal to support the creation and maintenance of GPS data products. 

This role reports to the Director of GPS Solutions and is a member of the broader GPSi team within GPS Global Operations.