Director of Web Applications

Back to careers

Company Background:

Gilt Groupe provides access, by invitation only, to Men's, Women's, Children's, Beauty, and Home coveted fashion and luxury brands at prices up to 70% off retail. Each sale lasts 36 hours and features hand selected styles from a single designer. The business model, based on urgency and scarcity, offers extraordinary goods at incredible prices, but only for a limited time. All of these sales occur daily at noon, driven by daily email reminders and alerts to a private membership. Most of the hot items are sold within the first 10 minutes, with the bulk of sales occurring within the first 90 minutes.

Job Description

This position is the most senior systems administration position at Gilt Groupe and carries significant responsibility ensuring that Gilt Groupe’s systems operate at full capacity and extremely high availability. This position will focus directly on the analysis of all production systems, development of detailed monitoring, planning for future capacity requirements, and the response to any production issues. This position will create a state of the art network operations center that will visibly aid in monitoring all activity on our production network.

Responsibilities

•    Develop strategy for monitoring all critical production level systems at appropriate level of detail
•    Creating and ownership of capacity planning tools and measurements. This position will need to measure the complete capacity of each individual system at Gilt Groupe, building models that provide realistic forecasts to allow for deployment of new capacity before it affects customer experience.
•    Oversee technology operations of a large scale web site in multiple geographies, warehouse management systems at multiple locations, customer relationship management systems, call center systems, inventory management systems, general ledger, order management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, data warehouses, EDI, etc.
•    Develop, staff and lead an organization capable of operating and maintaining business systems to deliver in excess of $1B of e-commerce revenue, 50K daily shipments and $2.5M in hourly revenue from millions of active users.
•    Develop, staff and operate an organization that provides 7x24 support for a $1B e-commerce web site serving millions of customers in multiple geographies.
•    Develop and maintain a network operations center for proactive 7x24 incident reporting, escalation, and resolution for all key business and web systems.
•    Maintain a culture of trust, integrity, and sense of urgency.

Required Skills & Experience

•    Passion and drive to achieve, delivering world-class operational performance.  Sites, applications, systems and servers that hiccup drive you crazy.  You take personal pride in multiple nines and high customer satisfaction.
•    Extraordinary fire-fighting skills.  You’ve seen numerous IT and business system failures in your career.  You contribute to and lead teams that identify root causes under business stress (e.g. web site failure, EDI feed failure, power failure, system failure, infrastructure failure, application failure, etc).   Where organizational failures occur, you lead post mortem analyses, modify processes, and adjust teams to improve future performance.
•    Previous leadership experience in online e-commerce involving electronic payment of physical goods, where inventory planning, warehouse management, and multiple business systems are involved.
•    Expert level knowledge of processes for capturing, measuring, analyzing and reporting analytics on network, business system and web site operations.
•    Previous experience running network cables, racking and stacking machines, building servers by hand, and time as a computer operator or sysadmin are an added bonus.  You must have worked for years in IT, have seen it all, and now want to share your experience with a very fast growing, young company.
•    Strong communication skills.  You are the eye of the storm when everything goes wrong, responding urgently and appropriately in critical situations.  You plan ahead for contingencies, develop communication plans with your team, and execute flawlessly (when nature allows).

Education

•    BS or MS in Computer Science


If interested, please send your resume to careers@gilt.com