Senior Technology Director - Merchandise Planning

About the role

We’re seeking a Senior Director Technology to define and execute a multi-year technology strategy that transforms how lululemon merchandises, plans, and delivers products to our guests. This leader will modernize the merchandise planning and allocations suite of solutions and related integration stacks, scale our capabilities to enable assortment planning, space planning, size planning, and embed AI-driven automation to compress planning cycles and unlock better business decision-making through both historical and forward-looking insights.

You will lead a global, multi-disciplinary engineering organization across North America and India, stewarding platforms, products, and vendor ecosystems that serve our merchants and planners end to end.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with internal stakeholders, drive change initiatives, and foster a culture of continuous improvement to keep pace with the organization’s growth strategy.
• Manage resources, oversee financial interests, and implement essential policies, practices, and processes.
• Evident leadership skills, a proven track record of building strong teams, setting high performance standards, challenging people to excel and eliciting their sustained high performance.
• Drive world-class engineering solutions that are reliable, observable, secure, compliant, and highly available.
• Blend deep technical expertise with visionary leadership to guide a globally dispersed engineering team that drives platform and solution modernization with advanced AI capabilities such as LLMs, vector retrieval, computer vision, and intelligent agents.
• Partner with AI/ML and Data COE to drive the design and implementation of scalable, secure, and responsible AI/ML-enabled systems that bridge merchandising and planning—ensuring technology accelerates decision-making.
• Translate lululemon’s merchandising and planning vision into a multi-year solution realization strategy.
• Leverage AI and ML solutions to drive measurable impact across planning capabilities that include attributes generation, demand forecasting, allocation optimization, store clustering, etc.
• Translate complex AI/ML architectures into clear narratives for executive stakeholders.
• Champion transparency, inclusion, and ethics as core enablers of innovation.
• Develop future-ready leaders capable of balancing technical depth and business acumen to drive meaningful growth.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or related field.
• 5+ years of engineering leadership and delivery experience.
• 5+ years in retail, merchandise planning and allocations, or related field is a bonus.
• Demonstrated experience managing large budgets.
• Demonstrated experience translating business strategy into technology and engineering roadmaps.
• Demonstrated experience in data-heavy planning systems such as Anaplan, Oracle RPAS, etc.
• Expert proficiency in programming languages (e.g., Python, Java) and relevant libraries/frameworks (TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn, etc.).
• Good understanding of machine learning, NLP, computer vision, and generative AI techniques.
• Able to produce documentation such as narratives and root cause analysis providing actionable insights.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and MLOps tools.
• Strong knowledge of data engineering concepts and big data.
• Continuous learning mindset that stays on the leading edge of applied ML, LLMs, and NLP advancements.
• Exceptional communication and storytelling skills for executive audiences.
• Master’s in computer science, applied mathematics, or statistics is a bonus.

Must-haves

• Acknowledge the presence of choice in every moment and take personal responsibility for your life.
• Possess an entrepreneurial spirit and continuously innovate to achieve great results.
• Communicate with honesty and kindness and create the space for others to do the same.
• Lead with courage, knowing the possibility of greatness is bigger than the fear of failure.
• Foster connection by putting people first and building trusting relationships.
• Integrate fun and joy as a way of being and working.

Pay

The typical hiring range for this position is from $223,100 – $292,800 annually; the base pay offered is based on market location and may vary depending on job-related knowledge, skills, experience, and internal equity. Permanent employees in this position may be eligible for our competitive annual bonus program and equity offerings, subject to program eligibility requirements.

Benefits

• Extended health and dental benefits and mental health plans
• Paid time off
• Savings and retirement plan matching
• Generous employee discount
• Fitness & yoga classes
• Parenthood top-up
• Extensive catalog of development course offerings
• People networks, mentorship programs, and leadership series

Schedule

Work is performed onsite, minimum 4 days per week.