OUR STORY

Ulta Beauty is the largest beauty retailer in the United States and the premier beauty destination for cosmetics, fragrance, skin, hair care products and salon services. Since opening its first store in 1990, Ulta has grown to become the top national retailer providing All Things Beauty, All in One Place™.Ulta Beauty offers more than 25,000 products from more than 500 well-established and emerging beauty brands across all categories and price points. Ulta Beauty also offers a full-service salon in every store featuring hair, skin, makeup and brow services. Ulta Beauty operates approximately 1,200 retail stores across all 50 states. We plan to continue expansion for the next several years, with an intent to operate 1,500 to 1,700 stores across the U.S. while driving strong growth in its e-commerce business.  Ulta is on a quest to bring the fun of beauty to all – constantly delighting guests while offering rewarding careers for passionate, beauty-loving associates.

GENERAL SUMMARY & SCOPE

Ulta Beauty is looking for a Director of Hardware to lead and direct all efforts related to strategy, design and development of store hardware solutions. Areas of responsibilities include physical registers, mobile devices, productivity equipment and all technical equipment within the stores.  They will be expected to influence our vendor’s R&D and innovation roadmaps based on Ulta’s needs.

The Director of Hardware will have a branch of engineering and will drive the In-Store Technology strategy and will be responsible for executing proof of concepts, while working with business partners, procurement, architecture and IT towards the implementation and final decision of new hardware components introduced to the enterprise.  They will also partner with the DevOps organization to identify and prove out deployment efficiencies, defect trends and root cause analysis to provide in depth insights to the applications team. 

PRINCIPAL DUTIES & RESPONSIBILITIES

• Develops hardware/device strategy utilizing industry standards.  Creates roadmap and executes the roadmap based on business requirements and strategy.
• Leads scoping and business priority setting for strategic business initiatives involving business policymakers and direction setters.
• Champions the implementation of capital programs and overall strategy vision to associates at all levels of the business operation, brings order to complex situations, and keeps a focus on business objectives. Manages the business case for funding capital programs and confirms continuing business viability of the program at regular intervals.
• Anticipates major changes affecting the organization and mobilizes resources to efficiently meet demand.
• Sets performance measurement objectives and the high-level implementation approach.
• Provides leadership for Ulta within the industry on the identification of future trends and competitive issues (e.g. technical, market sector, legislative). 
• Makes decisions that balance a variety of factors to achieve an optimal outcome for the enterprise and has capacity to be open, persuaded by new information and is comfortable exploring areas where there are no right answers.
• Initiates and manages relationships with business partners at the highest level to identify potential areas of mutual interest for future development, maintains an overview of the contribution of service delivery arrangements. 
• Negotiates and resolves contractual issues, including failure to meet contractual obligations and undertakes comprehensive financial evaluations.
• Advises on significant enterprise level improvements and measurable business benefits by identifying, proposing, initiating and leading significant programs of improvement. Champions a culture of “Improve Always”
• Manages individuals and teams. Allocates responsibilities and/or packages of work. Provides coaching and support and delegates responsibilities where possible, in order to achieve corporate objectives. Mentors and influences senior individuals in consideration of their career opportunities and contribution to the organization.
• Works to identify opportunities for improvement within the environment, both technical and operational, along with plans capture those benefits.
• Defines a strategy, builds the partnerships and implements the operations in partnership with the DevOps organization to recover assets by creating processes to help liquidate and redeploy obsolete equipment based on aging / inventory turn reports while reducing expensive monthly storage costs.
• Accountable for managing to department P/L and Project Budgets
• Identifies areas to improve standards, simplify, and enhance functionality to improve supportability and time to market.
• Sets best practices based upon broad experience in the retail industry
• Partners with the various vendors to receive pre-release hardware for Ulta’s Lab and reduces hardware testing costs by implementing and managing a vendor-assisted certification program.  

Requirements

JOB REQUIREMENTS

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology or equivalent experience required.
• 10+ years of IT leadership experience preferably in a retail environment
• 7+ years’ experience leading technology teams in a highly dynamic fast paced environment
• Strong team player with proven experience and ability to collaborate across a number of technology and business teams.
• Proven experience and ability to manage problem resolution of complex or intermittent issues in a multi-vendor, integrated enterprise environment.
• Strong verbal, written and presentation skills with the ability to effectively interact with internal and external business partners.
• Solid knowledge of industry best practices and technical systems.
• Must be proactive, self-directed, detailed and organized
• Demonstrated ability to create application development strategies and execute on those strategies.
• Effective leader of cross functional teams
• Familiarity with enterprise architecture and interface design
• Must be able to create a roadmap and execute transformational change
• Support off-hours production issues and code deployments as needed