Application Architect - Distribution Center

Wakefern Food Corp. is the largest retailer-owned cooperative in the United States and supports its co-operative members' retail operations, trading under the ShopRite®, Price Rite®, The Fresh Grocer®, Dearborn Markets®, and Gourmet Garage® banners.

Employing an innovative approach to wholesale business services, Wakefern focuses on helping the independent retailer compete in a big business world. Providing the tools entrepreneurs need to stay a step ahead of the competition, Wakefern’s co-operative members benefit from the company’s extensive portfolio of services, including innovative technology, private label development, and best-in-class procurement practices.

Summary

As a DC Replenishment Application Architect, you will work directly with our corporate divisions – included but not limited to procurement, warehouse and wholesale and retail stores to enhance and support our to enhance and support our Distribution Center (DC) technology solutions. You bring a unique skillset at the intersection of data architecture, operations, and predictive analytics, enabling you to translate complex business needs into scalable technical designs. You’ll also lead cross-functional integration efforts and play a key role in shaping the future of our replenishment systems.

You thrive in fast-paced environments, excel at managing customer relationships, and are passionate about delivering impactful, data-driven solutions.

What You’ll Do

A typical day might involve discussing data architecture with engineers, digging into data, and establishing technical implementation strategies and specifications for your team. Specifically, you will:

Lead technical activities team, deeply understand our IT systems and data outputs and how these map to the replenishment solution

Balance business and customer needs with technical constraints to get cross-functional consensus on innovative solutions, acting as a consultant and partner to technical teams

Lead technical integration work internally, coordinating across stakeholders spanning data engineering, product engineering, and data science

Identify technical risks, develop mitigation strategies, and lead integration improvements to completion

Capture learnings and best practices from integration efforts to create a sustainable, replicable playbook for future integrations across retailers’ fresh departments

Skills and Experience

This role is ideal for someone who is proficient in internal technical management, and also excels in client-facing situations

Candidates must also possess data transformation and design experience, as well as proven abilities to work jointly with data engineers, data scientists, and subject matter experts to manage refinement and implementation of integration requirements

Proficiency with common data transformation tools and platforms such as:

SQL (for querying and transforming structured data)

dbt (data build tool) for analytics engineering and transformation pipelines

Apache NiFi, Talend, or Informatica for ETL/ELT workflows

Python and libraries like Pandas for custom data manipulation

Airflow or other orchestration tools for managing data workflows

Experience designing, consuming, and integrating APIs (RESTful and/or GraphQL) to enable data exchange between systems.

Familiarity with API management tools (e.g., Postman, Swagger, Apigee) and best practices for secure, scalable API design.

Organizational skills, strong attention to detail, and ability to communicate details across levels and profiles

Proficiency in Excel and dashboarding tools such as Tableau, Power BI, or similar.

Ability to continuously learn, work independently, and make decisions with minimal supervision to keep projects on track

Nice to have:

Ideally, candidates would have an understanding of AI/ML systems and experience with identifying issues with data inputs used in predictive analysis

Mindset that allows you to understand and act on what our end users care about most

Dedication to quality, testing, design processes, automation, and operational excellence

Strong ability to create clear action plans for cross-functional technical team.