Principal Compute Engineer

Overview

Columbia Sportswear’s Digital Technology (CDT) organization is seeking a Principal Compute and Storage Infrastructure Engineer to drive the future of our On‑Prem and Hybrid environment. The role focuses on designing, building, securing, and operating enterprise‑scale infrastructure across Windows, Red Hat Linux, VMware, and Azure platforms.

• Lead technical design for on‑prem and hybrid infrastructure solutions, creating clear architecture diagrams and decision records.
• Serve as lead for a squad of engineers: coach, mentor, and drive consistent engineering practices.
• Collaborate closely with the India‑based Compute and Storage Infrastructure team to align standards, reference architectures, and roadmaps.
• Drive reliability and operations maturity through incident response leadership, post‑incident learning, runbooks, observability, and continuous improvement.
• Conduct technical reviews, audits, and assessments; keep documentation accurate, actionable, and up to date.
• Support Fin Ops practices by working with Finance, Platform, and Engineering teams on cost visibility, usage optimization, and spend governance.

• 8+ years of on‑prem infrastructure/platform engineering experience, including production environment ownership.
• Strong technical background with VMware, Windows Server, Red Hat Linux, and Azure.
• Experience with storage technologies such as Commvault, Dell Power Vault, Pure Storage, and Qumulo.
• Proven ability to lead technical design, trade‑off analysis, and documentation.
• Experience working with global or distributed teams and acting as a team lead or technical lead.
• Familiarity with automation tools (Git Hub Actions, Azure Dev Ops, Ansible, Power Shell) and CI/CD pipelines.
• Knowledge of on‑prem and hybrid security & governance controls (identity, network segmentation, policy‑as‑code, logging/monitoring).
• Experience with ITSM/ITIL and operational excellence practices;
  Jira Service Manager exposure is a plus.

Columbia Sportswear is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, national origin, disability, protected veteran status, age, or any other characteristic protected by law. Columbia is committed to providing reasonable accommodation for individuals with disabilities.