Principal Compute Engineer (Team Lead)

At Columbia, we're as passionate about the outdoors as you are. And while our gear is available worldwide, we're proud to be based in the Pacific Northwest, where natural wonders are our playground.

Every product we make and every task we undertake is inspired by the famous words of our founder, Gert Boyle: "It's perfect. Now make it better." As pioneers of relentless improvement, we are constantly evolving.

We believe the outdoors is ours to protect and strive to keep our planet healthy. We believe in empowering people to experience the outdoors to the fullest.

And we believe in you.

ABOUT THE POSITION

Columbia Sportswear is powered by technology that connects four global brands, a worldwide supply chain, and 500+ retail stores. Our Columbia Digital Technology (CDT) organization is looking for a Principle Infrastructure Engineer to help drive our future On-Prem and Hybrid transformation.

We are seeking a Principal Compute and Storage Infrastructure Engineer with strong on-prem and solid hybrid expertise and a focus on virtualized environments, Windows and Red Hat Linux operating systems, storage, global files sharing and replication/resilience, hybrid environments. In this role, you will help lead and keep our Global On-Prem environment reliable, secure, and well-governed; partnering with and supporting other engineers through operational execution, documentation, and continuous improvement. You will also help plan, design and deploy future state environments as we adapt to the business and changing technical landscape.

You bring deep On-Prem expertise with strong skills with Hybrid environments; familiarity with Azure and SaaS nuances.

HOW YOU'LL MAKE A DIFFERENCE

In this role, you'll lead and contribute hands-on as part of Columbia's global Infrastructure Engineering team to design, build, secure, and operate enterprise on-prem and hybrid platforms and services at scale.

You will:

• Lead technical design for on prem and hybrid infrastructure solutions (compute, storage, security, governance, and platform services), producing clear architecture diagrams and decision records
• Serve as team lead for a squad of engineers: coach/mentor engineers, and drive consistent engineering practices
• Partner closely with the India-based Compute and Storage Infrastructure team to align standards, reference architectures, and shared roadmaps; collaborate effectively across time zones
• Drive reliability and operations maturity: incident response leadership, post-incident learning, runbooks, observability, and continuous improvement
• Conduct technical reviews, audits, and assessments; ensure documentation is accurate, actionable, and kept current
• Drive financially efficient decisions and work with the Finance, Platform, and Engineering teams to support FinOps practices including cost visibility, usage optimization, and spend governance

This position plays a key role in shaping Columbia's on-prem and hybrid platform strategy and execution-building a stable, scalable, and secure foundation while enabling delivery teams worldwide.

YOU ARE

• A principal-level infrastructure engineer who combines strong hands-on delivery with solution architecture and design leadership
• Familiar with working with a globally diverse engineering teams
• A team lead who coaches others, drives accountability, and raises the quality bar through standards and reviews
• A collaborative partner who builds trusted relationships and works effectively with India-based Infrastructure teammates, product teams, and stakeholders across regions
• A clear and confident communicator-in both spoken and written-able to translate complex technical concepts for technical and non-technical audiences
• Someone who values documentation, repeatable automation, and process-driven engineering
• An analytical thinker who emphasizes structure, security, reliability, and cost awareness
• A proactive, self-directed engineer who thrives in a dynamic, global environment

YOU HAVE

• 8+ years of hands-on experience in on-prem infrastructure / platform engineering, including ownership of production environments
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Engineering, or related STEM field-or equivalent experience
• Extensive hands-on experience with a combination of the following: VMware, Windows Server OS, RedHat Linux, Commvault, Dell, Pure, Qumulo technologies
• Solid knowledge of Azure and SaaS environments
• Proven ability to lead technical design (architecture, trade-offs, documentation) and drive alignment across teams
• Experience working with global or distributed teams (GCC/multinational experience is a plus)
• Experience acting as a technical lead or team lead, including mentoring, code/IaC reviews, and delivery planning

• Experience working with Product Owners and engineers to understand the work and break it down into consumable pieces for engineers to act upon Experience with Jira, Confluence
• Strong automation bias

• Familiarity with GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, CI/CD, and automation tools such as Ansible and PowerShell
• Experience with on-prem and hybrid security and governance controls (e.g., identity, network segmentation, policy-as-code, logging/monitoring)
• Experience with ITSM/ITIL and operational excellence practices; exposure to Jira Service Manager is a plus

#LI-JD1

This job description is not meant to be an all-inclusive list of duties and responsibilities, but constitutes a general definition of the position's scope and function in the company.