Apply: WGSN - Technical Lead - Data Products

TITLE: Technical Lead – Data Products
DEPARTMENT: Technology
LOCATION: New York City
REPORTS TO: Director of Technical Delivery – Data Products
CLASSIFICATION: Exempt

The Technical Lead – Data Products is a data lifecycle expert with an understanding of technology and industry best practices
that can drive development to meet the needs of our Data Products line.
The ideal candidate has full stack experience implementing solutions across the data lifecycle to meet the needs of market
analysts, retail analysts, and retail buyers, including back-end solutions that can handle big data issues of scalability and
performance wedded to front-end dashboard solutions that provide the complex data visualizations required for evidencedriven
decision making.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
• Analyzes requirements and guides specifications to support analytical and data management applications across the
data lifecycle.
• Guides data modelling, database implementation and API design while also considering non-functional requirements
such as scalability, performance and maintainability.
• Follows IT trends, and determines where new approaches could be of benefit to the team’s products and practices.
• Introduces good practices by implementing them within existing projects and demonstrating their value to the
development team.
• Reviews code before it is deployed to QA to ensure it adheres to coding standards, is optimized in terms of time and
space complexity (Big O) and meets the requirements for which it was implemented.
• Implements product features as needed to meet product schedules.

REQUIRED BACKGROUND AND QUALIFICATIONS:
• B.S. degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Math or related discipline.
• At least 5 years hands-on experience working in software development, with a portion of that experience in data
management and analysis, including implementation of complex and feature rich data dashboards.
• Expertise in the principles of object-oriented programming and strong knowledge of OO PHP and JavaScript.
• Strong knowledge of modern web development practices, including service and event-oriented architectures,
asynchronous programming, REST APIs, JS and other MV* frameworks.
• Expert knowledge of relational database modelling and configuration, especially within MySQL.
• Extensive experience with Solr or other Lucene-based platforms.
• Experience interfacing with the APIs for data analysis and visualization tools such as SAS, SPSS and Tableau.
• Ability to sight-read code to identify defects in quality, efficiency and adherence to specifications, providing guidance
in correcting these issues.
• Clear and effective written and verbal communication a must.

DESIRABLE BACKGROUND AND QUALIFICATIONS:
• M.S. degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or Math.
• Experience with full software development lifecycles, including design, testing strategies (e.g. unit, integration,
functional, load), and version control.
• Experience with Java programming
• Experience coding JavaScript with CoffeeScript, and CSS with LESS.


WGSN is the World’s Global Style Network, digital subscription products include WGSN Trend, WGSN Homebuildlife,
WGSN INstock, and WGSN Mindset bespoke consultancy services.
WGSN has trend and information hubs in New York, Hong Kong, São Paulo and London and has 16 offices around the
world. We employ approximately 500 people, and more than 50% of our talent are content experts.
WGSN seeks talent globally to work within a business that offers a unique blend of creativity and intelligence, of
intuition and analysis to empower our customers to create tomorrow.