IT Director - Digital Delivery, Hybrid

Live the experience. From professional empowerment to continual learning opportunities. From ongoing investment in new and emerging technologies to a career of self-determination. At Ulta Beauty, our tech team is critical to our scalability—and is recognized that way. We’ve been defined as a “mature start-up.” A place where interdepartmental exposure, open doors, and genuine collaboration is ubiquitous. Where challenges come fast and furious, requiring agility, mental dexterity, and creativity. Where our passion for better solutions drives us and is core to who we are.

We’re engineering for the future of retail, and it’s no-holds-barred. But for those motivated by continual change and ambiguity, by superior leadership, by whip smart colleagues who will press you daily for your very best, you’ll find that virtually nothing’s impossible at Ulta Beauty.

THE IMPACT YOU CAN HAVE: 

The IT Director – Delivery, Digital Store Platform, is responsible for the technical strategy, roadmap, and delivery for Ulta’s digital products from technology standpoint. They are responsible for realizing the vision behind quickly evolving market opportunities, continuously adapting a multi-year technology roadmap to respond to shifting business strategies, with a focus on agility, scale, innovation, and time to value.

This role partners closely with peer eCommerce, Marketing, Product, and Technology leadership at the highest levels of the organization to support and drive significant revenue growth through new programs and capabilities.  This role builds technical roadmaps and research for ecommerce products, concepts, and product enhancements. They collaborate with team members to evaluate the practicality of production features and develop them across ecommerce channels.  

This role will lead a team of technical development managers, manage multiple product lifecycles, propose new ecommerce ideas, and collaborate with engineering and business teams for successful delivery and growth of Ulta’s ecommerce products. 

YOU'LL ACCOMPLISH ALL THESE GOALS BY: 

• Accountability/Relationship Management: Collaborate with executives, business partners, peers, and delivery teams to plan aligned roadmaps, delivery ownership and operational excellencies. Develop strategic relationships with stakeholders by understanding their needs and aligning the capabilities of the team accordingly. Ability to “take charge” and be accountable for capabilities evolution across all phases of operations to provide best customer experience.
• Innovation/Strategic Thinking: Drive a holistic vision and strategy for Digital Systems across the enterprise. Seek new opportunities, methods, trends, capabilities, and products for the advancement of the Digital Systems and align those to business benefits. Ability to objectively evaluate and challenge the status quo and leverage the right methodologies to accelerate progress. Maintain a strong understanding of industry and business, assisting the broader IT organization in the formation of strategy and approach to exploit technology, skills, and methods to drive significant impact to the bottom line.
• Quality and Performance Management: Drive high quality standards for all software builds and maintain quality standards consistently through established KPI measures on regular basis. Define and adopt quality standards and hold the team accountable for meeting the standard through quantitative measures. Drive effective retrospectives and root cause analysis to learn from failures and drive a culture of continuous improvement. Leverages the right level of technology, QA, automation, procedures, and resources to support quality. Builds and establishes measurements around operational methods, procedures, and tools, and validates that they are reviewed and maintained.  
• Organizational Development: Lead the Digital Store Platform teams through resource planning, up-skilling, career development and recruitment of future talent to drive business results and provide outstanding opportunities for our people. Coach, support, and delegate to empower the team. Get “hands on” when appropriate to both serve as model for expected performance and to remove obstacles impeding the team.
• Business Process Improvement:  Advises on significant enterprise level improvements and measurable business benefits by identifying, proposing, initiating, and leading significant programs of improvement. Champions a culture of continuous improvement.

• Change Implementation Planning and Management: Influences and provides the process, tools, and techniques to manage the technical and people aspects of change to achieve the required business results. Coordinates the business implementation plan, including scope and timing.
• Cultural Champion: Champion the adoption of agile and product development practices focused on delivering value by partnering with business stakeholders and serving as a mentor to teams.

ADDITIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Evaluates research and market analysis, including meeting with third party vendors, on industry innovations and technology platforms to understand demand; translate findings to inform the strategy.
• Establishes and nurtures strategic vendor relationships; influences vendors to align to domain, portfolio, and enterprise strategic objectives.
• Defines and communicates value propositions, success metrics, and outcomes
  Documents, reviews, and ensures that all quality and change control standards are met.
• Develops and implements sustainable, repeatable, and reliable processes; oversees process improvement.
• Responsible for driving the annual budgeting and planning process to prioritize projects and allocate assigned budget targets to develop an Annual IT Budget. Translate the Annual IT Budget into a staffing plan, including flexible resource allocation models.
• Provides leadership, mentoring and coaching to direct reports.
• Attracts, retains, develops, and motivates top talent.
• Drives the development of leaders by conducting annual and mid-year reviews, reviewing individual development plans, and providing performance feedback.
• Supports talent management efforts by monitoring the succession planning and selection process, as well as challenging and empowering leaders on individual development plans.

THE ESSENTIALS FOR SUCCESS:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, CIS, or equivalent professional experience
• 10 years of IT leadership experience

• 7 years’ experience leading engineering teams in a leadership role
• Experience delivering in support of digital and/or eCommerce businesses at scale
• Ability to use data to drive key and impactful decision-making and quality

• Solid experience with hybrid & cloud environments
• Proven experience in eliciting requirements and enterprise automation
• Solid experience writing product development requirements and architecture
• Demonstrated experience in generating process modeling
• Must be able to create a roadmap and execute transformational change
• Able to manage 3^rd party providers to deliver maximum success.
• Excellent communication skills; feels comfortable working with non-technical business partners.
• Able to solve complex problems efficiently and with minimal assistance.
• Ability to manage through conflicting priorities and tight deadlines.
• Highly proficient in articulating technology strategy and benefits to a non-technical audience
• Driver of results through persuasion and articulating a vision of what is possible.
• Work with teams across onshore / offshore, remote work and staff augmentation models.
• Flexibility after hours, on weekends, and during peak season (holiday) as necessary to support the team and business operations.

At Ulta Beauty (NASDAQ: ULTA), the possibilities are beautiful. Ulta Beauty is the largest North American beauty retailer and the premier beauty destination for cosmetics, fragrance, skin care products, hair care products and salon services. We bring possibilities to life through the power of beauty each and every day in our stores and online with more than 25,000 products from approximately 500 well-established and emerging beauty brands across all categories and price points, including Ulta Beauty’s own private label. Ulta Beauty also offers a full-service salon in every store featuring—hair, skin, brow, and make-up services.

We will consider for employment all qualified applicants, including those with arrest records, conviction records, or other criminal histories, in a manner consistent with the requirements of any applicable state and local laws, including the City of Los Angeles’ Fair Chance Initiative for Hiring Ordinance, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, and the New York City Fair Chance Act.