Architect IT Solutions Data and Martech

Academy Sports + Outdoors • Katy, TX

2d • Onsite

About The Position

At Academy Sports + Outdoors, the vision is to be the best sports + outdoors retailer in the country, driven by a passionate, purpose-driven team committed to each other and their customers. The company has spent over 80 years building a culture that prioritizes people, creating opportunities for growth, fostering meaningful connections, and supporting every Team Member’s journey. Academy believes in the power of fun and offers a place where team members can launch their own adventures. As one of the nation’s largest sporting goods and outdoor retailers with over 22,000 team members, Academy prides itself on creating a workplace environment that values hard work, commitment, and growth.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or a related field
• 8+ years of experience in customer data, data engineering, or MarTech domains, with at least 3 years in marketing technology architecture, including personalization and customer engagement solutions
• MarTech data domain expert skilled in customer data, clickstream, identity resolution, segmentation, and activation across owned, paid, and partner channels.
• Proven expertise in CDP (COTS or in-house), Customer Master Data management, CRM/loyalty systems, and Customer 360 solutions.
• Experience defining identity resolution strategies (first-party, hybrid, and third-party) and understanding tradeoffs across CDP, data warehouse, and external identity providers.
• Experience implementing privacy, consent management, and data governance frameworks, including consent enforcement and data lineage.
• Experience designing architectures for personalization, ML decisioning, loyalty programs, closed-loop measurement, and attribution.
• Hands-on experience with marketing automation platforms (ESP/SMS/Push) integrated with customer data and analytics platforms.
• End-to-end experience across the MarTech and AdTech stack, spanning CDP, Customer Master Data, personalization engines, paid media platforms, analytics, attribution, and customer data activation.
• Background integrating CMS/DAM platforms with personalization and engagement ecosystems.
• Experience supporting Retail Media Networks (RMN), audience monetization, and paid media activation using first-party data.
• Experience evaluating and selecting MarTech/AdTech platforms, including build vs buy decisions and vendor architecture assessments.
• Skilled in high-volume, high-velocity data ingestion architectures (batch and streaming).
• Experience working with Data Science teams to operationalize ML models into customer-facing workflows.
• Proficiency with MarTech/AdTech platforms such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Experience Cloud, Braze, HubSpot, Google Analytics, or similar ecosystems.
• Expertise in Customer Data: Customer Data Platforms, Customer Data Warehouse, Customer Master Data, Customer 360.
• Expertise in Identity Resolution: First-party, hybrid, and third-party identity graphs, deterministic and probabilistic matching.
• Expertise in Marketing Platforms: ESP/SMS/Push, CRM, CMS/DAM, personalization, and decisioning engines.
• Expertise in AdTech/Media: Paid media platforms, attribution frameworks, Retail Media Networks, audience activation.
• Experience with Cloud Platforms: GCP preferred (AWS/Azure acceptable).
• Knowledge of Integration Patterns: APIs, microservices, event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub).
• Experience with Data Platforms: Data lakes, data warehouses, Lakehouse patterns, structured and unstructured databases.
• Expertise in Customer Data Governance: Consent management, data lineage, auditability, data contracts.
• Proficiency in Architecture Strategy: Build vs buy evaluation, platform scalability, cost optimization, real-time vs batch tradeoffs.
• Experience with AI/GenAI adoption: Leveraging AI/GenAI across marketing use cases and software development to drive personalization, automation, and engineering efficiency.
• Experience with Process Automation: DevOps, AIOps & automation frameworks for Martech.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills with the ability to simplify complex concepts for business and executive stakeholders.
• Strong problem-solving, creativity, and ability to balance technical rigor with business value.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree
• Exposure to AI-driven engagement, automation, and GenAI

Responsibilities

• Define and deliver solution architectures for CDP, Customer Master Data, Customer 360, marketing automation, personalization, and attribution ecosystems.
• Establish target-state architecture across CDP, Data Warehouse, and Customer Master Data with clear separation of concerns between data mastering, activation, and analytics.
• Ensure seamless connectivity between MarTech platforms, AdTech tools, data platforms, CMS/DAM systems, and analytics ecosystems.
• Define and govern identity resolution, enterprise customer ID strategy, and consent enforcement, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations and enterprise data policies.
• Architect real-time and batch decisioning frameworks, enabling scalable personalization, experimentation, and ML-driven customer engagement.
• Define standards for data flows, identity management, customer mastering approaches, and content governance across platforms.
• Enable first-party data activation across paid media and Retail Media Networks, supporting audience creation, targeting, and monetization.
• Evaluate MarTech and AdTech platforms, drive build vs buy decisions, and optimize platform usage and cost, including CDP unit economics.
• Stay ahead of trends in MarTech, AdTech, AI, and analytics, recommending new technologies and approaches that drive measurable business outcomes.
• Serve as design authority for customer data and marketing technology, ensuring scalability, security, compliance, and alignment with enterprise architecture standards.
• Partner with Marketing, Product, IT, Data Science, and vendors to align on roadmaps, define capability-driven Architecture models, and deliver reusable, scalable solutions.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Number of Employees: 1,001-5,000 employees