Architect - Logistics Systems
Williams-Sonoma · India
Williams-Sonoma India Technology Center
Job Description
| Role Title | Architect - Logistics Systems |
| Location | Pune / Hyderabad, India (Hybrid) |
About Williams-Sonoma India Technology Center
Williams-Sonoma India Technology Center is the technology hub for Williams-Sonoma, Inc., supporting global digital commerce, supply chain, enterprise platforms, and customer experiences across our portfolio of brands. The India Technology Center partners closely with global business and engineering teams to build scalable, resilient, and innovative platforms that serve millions of customers worldwide.
About the Team
The Logistics Technology team builds and supports the platforms that move products across the WSI supply chain, from distribution center operations and warehouse management to transportation and delivery for brands including Williams Sonoma, Pottery Barn, West Elm, and Rejuvenation. The team partners with Supply Chain, Distribution Center operations, product teams, delivery teams, and third-party vendors to deliver scalable solutions that keep fulfillment fast, accurate, and cost-effective.
This is a hands-on, high-ownership team where architects and engineers work end to end: setting technical direction, designing systems, integrating with WMS and TMS platforms, and applying automation and AI to improve how the distribution network runs every day.
About the Role
The Senior Architect will own the Logistics systems domain and provide broad technical leadership across Warehouse Management, Warehouse Execution, Warehouse Control, and Transportation Management platforms. The role sets architectural direction, defines and governs technical standards, and translates large programs and strategic initiatives into viable, scalable, and maintainable solutions.
The role requires a senior technical leader who can operate as a domain subject matter expert, influence product and engineering direction, partner effectively with business stakeholders and vendors such as Manhattan Associates, and mentor architects and engineering practitioners across the enterprise.
Key Responsibilities
- Set technical direction for the Logistics systems domain and ensure project and program designs align with enterprise principles, standards, and constraints.
- Create viable solution approaches for complex programs, decompose them into logical components, and define responsibilities, integration points, and dependencies across layers and systems.
- Propose and evaluate alternative designs, clearly articulate trade-offs, and make sound architectural decisions across competing approaches.
- Assess design impact across solution components and adjacent domain systems, including implications over a three-to-five-year horizon.
- Define and own enterprise integration architecture across WMS, WES, WCS, OMS, RMS, ERP, and TMS landscapes, including integration boundaries, canonical data flows, and system-of-record ownership.
- Decide the right integration style for each interaction, including synchronous, asynchronous, event-driven, and batch patterns, and document rationale, failure modes, idempotency, and recovery expectations.
- Design and govern reusable integration patterns, templates, service contracts, and reference implementations that delivery teams can adopt without rework.
- Define and advise on enterprise API standards, including versioning, backward compatibility, deprecation policy, governance, and security.
- Lead performance engineering for high-throughput and low-latency logistics workloads, including performance test strategy, capacity planning, bottleneck analysis, and ongoing optimization.
- Apply product thinking to platform and integration decisions by prioritizing capabilities based on user outcomes, business value, consumer needs, and roadmap alignment.
- Partner with product management and business teams to understand strategic initiatives and help decompose programs into deliverable projects.
- Initiate, lead, and contribute to creation and review of organizational technical standards, design principles, and architecture governance practices.
- Provide technical direction to architects and practitioners across Logistics and adjacent domains, review solution work, and mentor teams on complex technical topics.
- Accept ambiguity in large initiatives and devise practical approaches to resolve or accommodate uncertainty while maintaining delivery momentum.
Required Qualifications
Experience
- 12+ years of software engineering and solution architecture experience, including at least 4 years in an architect role owning a business or systems domain.
- Proven track record setting architectural direction for enterprise-scale logistics, supply chain, retail, or distribution systems.
- Experience delivering in Agile environments, including program decomposition, estimation, and delivery tracking using Jira.
- Experience operating as a recognized subject matter expert across multiple major functions within a domain.
Functional Expertise
- Proficient knowledge of Warehouse Management Systems, Warehouse Execution Systems, Warehouse Control Systems, and Transportation Management systems.
- Strong understanding of Distribution Center operations, slotting, labor management, fulfillment flows, and logistics execution processes.
- Hands-on experience with Manhattan WMOS and Manhattan Slotting, including third-party vendor integrations.
- Strong business acumen with the ability to connect technology direction to revenue, cost, service-level, and operational goals.
- Ability to learn adjacent skills and domains quickly where needed to make sound enterprise architecture decisions.
Technical Expertise
- Deep technical expertise in microservices architecture, enterprise integration patterns, and scalable infrastructure design.
- Hands-on experience with Java, Spring Boot, RESTful web services, and event-driven integration using Kafka.
- Strong relational database skills across DB2, SQL Server, and Oracle, including data modeling for high-volume transactional systems.
- Experience with Kubernetes or similar container platforms, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and modern engineering practices.
- Working knowledge of secure coding standards, Git branching strategy, and code quality tools such as Sonar.
- Proficiency with observability tools such as AppDynamics, Splunk, ELK, and Grafana.
- Breadth across REST, messaging, streaming, file and batch interfaces, API gateways, and middleware, with sound judgment to select the right pattern for each use case.
- Experience defining API and event contract standards, including versioning, backward compatibility, schema evolution, and governance forums.
- Strong background in performance and load test design, throughput and latency profiling, capacity planning, and tuning of high-volume transactional systems.
- Working knowledge of zero-trust principles, OAuth 2.0, OIDC, mTLS, token and secrets management, and API security controls.
AI and Automation Skills
- AI-first mindset with the ability to define where AI and automation can create durable business and operational value.
- Experience using AI tools, AI agents, or automation platforms to improve operations, production support, data validation, reporting, testing, documentation, or knowledge retrieval.
- Ability to architect AI-agent led solutions for issue triage, exception monitoring, report generation, regression testing support, operational analytics, and enterprise knowledge retrieval.
- Practical understanding of retrieval-augmented generation, Model Context Protocol, agent tooling patterns, and safe grounding of AI in enterprise data and systems.
- Understanding of responsible AI practices including data privacy, security, auditability, compliance, validation of AI-generated outputs, and agent behavior evaluation.
- Awareness of AI security considerations such as prompt injection, data leakage, model and tool access control, tenant isolation, and guarded tool execution.
- Awareness of emerging supply chain data and compliance requirements such as Digital Product Passports and product traceability mandates.
Leadership and Collaboration
- Demonstrated situational leadership with the ability to guide teams, drive execution, and deliver measurable business value.
- Ability to facilitate productive discussions across diverse stakeholder groups and drive alignment on architectural decisions.
- Experience mentoring architects and engineers and raising engineering standards across an organization.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to explain, defend, and adapt architectural decisions for both technical and business audiences.
Education
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
Why Join Williams-Sonoma India Technology Center
- Our people-first and performance-driven culture means that we provide opportunities to grow and build a career, and invest in the well-being of our associates, including comprehensive benefits to support you and your family.
- Scale and innovation of a Fortune 500 company combined with a high-ownership environment that empowers engineers to make real impact.
- Build and operate large-scale digital commerce and supply chain platforms serving millions of customers worldwide, working on systems that run at global scale.
- Continuous learning environment with opportunities to work on cutting-edge technologies, AI-driven solutions, and large-scale engineering challenges.
- Hybrid work model designed for flexibility and collaboration, with two in-office days for team engagement.