At DICK’S Sporting Goods, we believe in how positively sports can change lives. On our team, everyone plays a critical role in creating confidence and excitement by personally equipping all athletes to achieve their dreams. We are committed to creating an inclusive and diverse workforce, reflecting the communities we serve.

If you are ready to make a difference as part of the world’s greatest sports team, apply to join our team today!

OVERVIEW:

Our company is looking to invest in our future as we embark on a journey from being the best sports retailer in the world to becoming the best sports company in the world. We’re building an unrivaled and agile inventory ecosystem fueled by predictive insights, operational excellence, strategic partnerships, and empowered teams. Our goal: deliver the right product to the right place at the right time—every time. If you’re passionate about innovation, data, and making a tangible impact, Inventory360 is where you can help lead the future of retail.

Are you a curious, analytically minded technologist who thrives on turning ambiguous business problems into clear, data-driven answers? This is an opportunity to sit at the intersection of data strategy, business intelligence, and architecture for a leading sports retailer with $14B+ in revenue and 800+ physical stores.

At DICK'S Sporting Goods, we put our Athletes (customers) and Teammates (employees) at the center of every decision. That means building a deep understanding of who they are, what they need, and how data can serve them better — across every channel, every touchpoint, and every moment that matters. When you join our Technology team, you join a team that wins together.

About the Role

This is not a purely technical architecture role. The Solution Architect – Data is a hybrid practitioner: part data architect, part analyst, part discovery lead. You will be the connective tissue between business stakeholders and data engineering — someone who can walk into a room with a VP of Merchandising or a Loyalty team and help them articulate not just what they want to build, but what questions they are truly trying to answer with their data.

You will lead discovery and requirements workshops, translate business intent into actionable data requirements, analyze data to validate hypotheses and surface insights, and produce the documentation and artifacts that allow engineering teams to build with confidence. Data architecture is part of your toolkit — but your greatest leverage is your ability to make data meaningful to the people who use it.

What You'll Do

Discovery & Requirements

• Lead business stakeholder workshops to surface data needs, refine use cases, and drive ambiguous asks toward precise, answerable questions

• Partner with Product to challenge, sharpen, and validate requirements before engineering investment begins

• Translate business outcomes — loyalty, customer lifetime value, athlete behavior, in-store and digital performance — into data requirements and analytical framings

• Identify gaps between what data exists, what is accessible, and what the business needs to operate effectively

Data Analysis & Insight Generation

• Analyze large, complex datasets across customer, transactional, behavioral, and operational domains to validate requirements, identify patterns, and inform solution design

• Develop and socialize analytical findings that directly influence product and platform decisions

• Support self-service data enablement by helping business users understand and interact with data assets more effectively

• Act as a thought partner on loyalty and customer data strategy, bringing a retail/CPG analytics lens to how we understand athlete behavior across channels

Documentation & Artifacts

• Produce clear, professional artifacts including current and future state data flows, domain data models, source-to-target mappings, data dictionaries, and decision records

• Document data lineage, governance considerations, and integration patterns in a way that is accessible to both technical and non-technical audiences

• Maintain discovery outputs — workshop notes, requirement briefs, use case trackers — that keep stakeholders and engineering aligned through delivery

Data Architecture

• Apply data architecture principles to evaluate, design, and recommend solutions across our cloud data platforms

• Contribute to enterprise data model standards, integration patterns, and platform decisions in partnership with engineering and foundational tech teams

• Assess data quality, lineage, and governance implications of proposed solutions

• Ensure designs account for scalability, reliability, and cost — without over-engineering for the problem at hand

Our Tech Environment

You will work within and across the following stack. Hands-on familiarity with the core platforms is expected; experience with the "nice to have" is a plus.

Core:

• Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2 (ADLS Gen 2)

• Azure Databricks (Delta Lake, Unity Catalog, Delta Live Tables)

• Snowflake

• Apache Kafka

• Power BI

• Qlik (on-prem)

• Python & SQL (strong proficiency required)

• DBSchema or equivalent ERD tooling

Nice to Have:

• Google Big Query

• Cloud-native platform concepts (Kubernetes, containerization, distributed systems)

What We're Looking For

• 7–10 years of experience spanning data engineering, analytics, and/or solution architecture

• Demonstrated ability to lead discovery sessions and translate business problems into data requirements — asking "what question are you trying to answer?" before reaching for a tool

• Strong hands-on SQL and Python skills; you are comfortable getting into the data yourself

• Experience with customer and loyalty data in a retail or omnichannel commerce context

• Comfort working across behavioral, transactional, and operational datasets at enterprise scale

• Excellent written and verbal communication — creating artifacts and documentation that are clear, practical, and widely adopted by teams

• Experience with cloud-based data platforms and modern data architecture patterns (Medallion architecture, Data Mesh concepts, Data Catalog, Data Quality frameworks)

• Ability to hold a room: facilitating workshops, presenting findings, and influencing without authority

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems or related field required.

Why This Role

This role sits at a genuinely interesting juncture: a large, data-rich retailer that is investing seriously in understanding its athletes across in-store, digital, and mobile — and building the data capabilities to do it well. You will have real influence over how that data story gets told, structured, and acted on.

QUALIFICATIONS:

• General Education: Master’s degree or equivalent level preferred

• General Experience: Substantial general work experience together with comprehensive job-related experience in own area of expertise to fully competent level (Over 6 years to 10 years)

• Managerial Experience: Experience of general supervision of more junior colleagues

VIRTUAL REQUIREMENTS:

At DICK’S, we thrive on innovation and authenticity. That said, to protect the integrity and security of our hiring process, we ask that candidates do not use AI tools (like ChatGPT or others) during interviews or assessments.

To ensure a smooth and secure experience, please note the following:

• Cameras must be on during all virtual interviews.

• AI tools are not permitted to be used by the candidateduring any part of the interview process.

• Offers are contingent upon a satisfactory background check which may include ID verification.

If you have any questions or need accommodations, we’re here to help. Thanks for helping us keep the process fair and secure for everyone!

Targeted Pay Range: $95,200.00 - $158,800.00. This is part of a competitive total rewards package that could include other components such as: incentive, equity and benefits. Individual pay is determined by a number of factors including experience, location, internal pay equity, and other relevant business considerations. We review all teammate pay regularly to ensure competitive and equitable pay.DICK'S Sporting Goods complies with all state paid leave requirements. We also offer a generous suite of benefits. To learn more, visit www.benefityourliferesources.com.