Manager in Strategy & Data Science

IN SHORT: We are establishing a Global Technology Center in China to serve as a strategic R&D and innovation center for next-generation retail and commercial platforms. As Head of Engineering, you will be responsible for building, leading, and scaling this hub, owning the end-to-end engineering strategy, execution, and talent agenda. This role combines deep technical leadership, organizational building, and global stakeholder management. You will operate at the intersection of China’s highly advanced retail ecosystem and our global technology platform, delivering software products that power markets across the globe. You will report into global technology leadership and act as a key member of the Global Engineering Leadership Team. Your entrepreneurial and result-driven mindset, combined with strong hands-on technical oversight and execution skills, will make you a key member of the core team on which On’s future is built. YOUR MISSION: Your mission is to build a world-class engineering organization in Shanghai, China that delivers globally scalable, locally excellent retail technology platforms. You will: * Establish China as a center of excellence for retail innovation * Lead the development of proprietary, self-owned global platforms * Ensure China-based teams operate as first-class global product teams * Balance China-specific depth with global platform standardization * Build an engineering culture rooted in technical excellence, ownership, and global impact LEAD WITH VISION — AND WITH CODE * Lead and scale multiple engineering teams responsible for building globally critical retail and commercial platforms from China. * Shape the technical direction, platform roadmap, and execution focus in close partnership with Product, Architecture, Security, and Global Tech Leadership. * Stay deeply hands-on: participate in architectural design, challenge system boundaries, review complex trade-offs, and guide critical technical decisions with clarity and conviction. * Ensure all platforms align with the global architecture north star, long-term platform strategy, and regulatory requirements across regions. * Act as a visible technical leader who sets the bar for engineering excellence, ownership, and quality. BUILD GLOBAL PLATFORMS WITH CHINA-FIRST INNOVATION * Own the delivery, quality, and technical excellence of globally deployed platforms built and operated from the China Tech Hub. * Lead the development of self-owned, modular, and scalable architectures that combine: * Deep local innovation leveraging China’s advanced retail and technology ecosystem. * A unified global core enabling rapid localization across APAC, EMEA, and AMER. * Drive predictable execution by breaking down complex initiatives, managing uncertainty, and unblocking teams to deliver consistently at scale. * Maintain high operational resilience by enforcing SLOs, incident response standards, security practices, and platform reliability expectations. * Continuously raise the bar for how teams design, test, deploy, observe, and evolve production systems. SHAPE CULTURE AND GROW WORLD-CLASS TALENT * Build and nurture a high-performing engineering culture rooted in technical rigor, ownership, openness, and continuous learning. * Champion global engineering values and principles through visible role modeling and decision-making. * Coach and mentor Engineering Managers and senior engineers, developing strong technical leadership and succession pipelines. * Own hiring strategy and decisions for the China hub, consistently raising the talent bar in a highly competitive market. * Establish clear career paths, expectations, and feedback loops that enable engineers to grow and thrive. COLLABORATE AND COMMUNICATE WITH INFLUENCE * Tell clear, compelling technical stories—translating complex systems and trade-offs into clarity for senior stakeholders. * Drive alignment across global engineering, product, and business teams, ensuring shared understanding and coordinated execution. * Build trusted partnerships across regions, functions, and cultures, operating effectively in a highly distributed global environment. * Represent the China Tech Hub in global engineering leadership forums, architectural reviews, and cross-functional initiatives. CONNECT ENGINEERING WORK TO BUSINESS IMPACT * Understand the end-to-end commercial and retail journey, and connect engineering investments directly to scalability, speed, cost efficiency, and business outcomes. * Operate with a platform-first mindset, ensuring solutions simplify the ecosystem, reduce duplication, and unlock future velocity. * Balance short-term delivery needs with long-term technical health, ensuring sustainable growth of global platforms. YOUR STORY: * Proven experience leading multiple engineering teams (ICs and Engineering Managers) within complex, fast-moving, product-driven organizations operating at global scale. * A strong technical foundation with hands-on experience designing and evolving large-scale e-commerce platforms, including customer-facing, transactional, and backend commerce systems. * Demonstrated experience architecting and delivering Point of Sale (POS) platforms and solutions, including system design for in-store operations, payments, and omnichannel integration. * Deep understanding of distributed systems, platform architecture, and integration patterns, with systems operating across regions and regulatory environments. * Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills—you translate technical complexity into clarity, influence decision-making, and create alignment across engineering, product, and business leadership. * A consistent track record of delivering high-impact platforms and products with predictability, quality, and measurable outcomes. * Experience shaping system architecture, influencing engineering principles and technical standards, and driving strong governance without slowing teams down. * A genuine passion for coaching, mentoring, and growing engineering leaders, and for building a healthy, high-performing engineering culture. * Comfort navigating ambiguity, making high-judgment calls, and aligning distributed, cross-regional teams around a shared mission and technical vision. * A builder’s mindset—resourceful, pragmatic, and execution-oriented, with a bias toward learning fast and iterating intelligently. * An entrepreneurial spirit—you think in terms of platform leverage, long-term value, and ownership, and you act like a true steward of the technology and the organization. * Collaborative, grounded, and energized by building platforms and teams that deliver real global business impact. * Fluent in English and Mandarin and able to operate confidently in cross-cultural environments. WHAT WE OFFER: We offer a dynamic, challenging and sportive environment that has been ranked as the ‘fastest growing sports company’ of its time. With offices across the globe, we are an international team who is hungry to innovate and build something incredible. We foster an active environment where each individual thrives for excellence and can achieve their full potential. This is where your work matters, you’re hands-on and your team members are amongst the very best in their respective disciplines and fields.    If you are driven to bring On to the next level, curious about the opportunity and want to be part of our growing team send us your application, and join the ONiverse!

The role We’re looking for a CMF Senior Strategist to join our Consumer Tech global content team and become an integral part of our content function.   With a visionary attitude, this Senior Strategist-level role will have significant research, design and product development experience within CMF (colour, material, and finish) and application processes, with proven success in the design and development of products in consumer electronics, home appliances, or automotive industries. Experience working with automotive, fashion and/or interior CMF applications is a plus.    Revelant technical knowledge of material technology and processes within the product design, consumer electronics, home appliance and automotive industries is vital. You must have a keen ability to connect upfront macro trend research with technical production knowledge, and an innate curiosity to explore how new developments in innovative material technology and processes can be implemented to facilitate purposeful and responsible design.   You will be highly articulate in written and visual communication. You will be highly skilled in interpreting CMF trends, exploration and application of innovative material technology to articulate future CMF trend forecasts. With a focus on personal content creation, you’ll also edit and manage content creation from junior members of the team.   The CMF Senior Strategist is seen as a trusted CMF industry expert. A CMF Senior Strategist is client-facing and meets regularly with Enterprise-level clients. This role is based in Asia or in the US.     Working at WGSN Together, we create tomorrow A career with WGSN is fast-paced, exciting and full of opportunities to grow and develop. We’re a team of consumer and design trend forecasters, content creators, designers, data analysts, advisory consultants and much more, united by a common goal: to create tomorrow.   WGSN’s trusted consumer and design forecasts power outstanding product design, enabling our customers to create a better future. Our services cover consumer insights, beauty, consumer tech, fashion, interiors, lifestyle, food and drink forecasting, data analytics and expert advisory. If you are an expert in your field, we want to hear from you.   Role overview WGSN Consumer Tech has ambitious plans for 2026 and beyond. We are looking for a talented CMF Senior Strategist to join our growing content team.   What will you be doing?   The CMF Senior Strategist will be responsible for researching and creating solution-driven CMF forecasts that demonstrate a clear understanding of client needs across multiple Consumer Tech categories and tech relevance across industries such as automotive, fashion, interiors, and beauty. You will be responsible for delivering this content in either written, image, video or audio formats. You’ll also be responsible for advising on new CMF content needs based on client feedback to support the Consumer Tech content strategy as set by the Content Director and/or Head of CMF.   Technical knowledge of colours, materials and finishes for applications in product design across consumer electronics, home appliances and automotive industries is vital. Experience working with fashion and interior CMF applications is a plus. You’ll be highly articulate in written and visual communication. You will be highly skilled in interpreting trends and have an expert understanding of the role data and analytics play in commercial success.   The team Our vision is for WGSN to welcome all people of all identities as our customers and team members. We believe that welcoming a range of diverse backgrounds and perspectives is the right thing to do and helps us create a more inclusive and better business for our clients who operate in Fashion, Beauty, Interiors, Food and Drink, Insight, Consumer Tech, Sports and Outdoors and beyond.     You will work with a diverse team from across the globe, spanning multiple time zones. They are forward thinkers with a keen eye for detail and always find better and smarter ways of working.   Key Accountabilities Forecasting and tracking the Consumer Tech industry with quantitative and qualitative data within all markets and demographics Active participation in the content for WGSN’s Strategic Forecasting internal events Deliver traffic growth by consistently evaluating internal data and client feedback to improve content standards and relevance Advise new CMF content needs following client feedback to support the content strategy of department as directed by the Content Director and/or Head of CMF Manage a team of international freelancers to commission and edit content Responsible for the main ‘peer review’ of CMF content created for their relevant segments, as directed by the Content Director and/or Head of CMF Collaborate with Consumer Tech team and wider content teams across multiple Industries Travel nationally and internationally to cover industry trade shows, conferences and other events as required Work with the Sales teams to support client relationships Speak to clients regularly to understand their needs Servicing Enterprise Clients by delivering analyst calls and presentations Participates in marketing content as required, such as live events, webinars and podcasts Partner with the Marketing department in the creation and delivery of promotional materials to drive growth and build awareness of Consumer Tech Provide quotes for press and broadcast media as required Behaves as a department Ambassador both internally and externally  This list is not exhaustive, and there may be other activities you are required to deliver.   Skills, experience & qualifications required Seen to be or known to be a CMF expert within the Consumer Tech and adjacent industries, with a list of industry contacts Significant career experience within CMF trend research, product development or content creation, and demonstrates a deep understanding of the area of expertise Expert knowledge of the global market from macro to micro trends across a broad range of product areas - automotive, consumer, technology, fashion, interiors and lifestyle product areas, and the ability to pinpoint trends that will impact the area of expertise Expert technical experience with Industrial design software programs, such as KeyShot and Adobe Creative Cloud Expert level of research, analysis, writing and editing content Expert understanding of the role data and analytics play in commercial success. Ability to analyse data and pinpoint trends that will impact the market. Excellent written English Ability to take ownership of personal assignments, prioritise workload, manage and support other members of the team Excellent organisation, communication and management skills with the ability to work within an international team to ensure content or outputs are of a consistently high standard and submitted on time Ability to build strong working relationships with key stakeholders in the business, from Sales, Client Services and Marketing Excellent presentation skills with proven experience in presenting to internal stakeholders, external clients and events Must be a self-starter and able to work independently Technical skills: KeyShot, Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, social media platforms, and AI tools such as Midjourney, ChatGPT, Gemini etc.   What we offer Our benefits and wellbeing package offers flexible benefits you can tailor to your own personal needs.   More about WGSN WGSN is the global authority on consumer trend forecasting. We help brands around the world create the right products at the right time for tomorrow’s consumer.   Our values We Are Everywhere The future is everything; it happens everywhere. WGSN is the world's leading forecaster because we track and analyse consumer behaviours, product innovation, design and creativity everywhere. We Are Future Focused We utilise our global resources and intelligence to research, source and analyse quantitative and qualitative data to produce our forecasts. Everything we do is focused on working with our customers to create a successful and positive tomorrow. We Are Rigorous We source, review and assess quantitative and qualitative data to produce robust, actionable forecasts. To provide credible insights and design solutions for our clients, it is essential that rigour runs through everything we do.   Our culture An inclusive culture is one of our key priorities. We want our people to truly be themselves and thrive. We love having a diverse team of people who bring new ideas, different strengths and perspectives & reflect the global audience we work with.   Inclusive workforce We are committed to supporting the environment and sustainability, including ensuring our pension plan defaults to sustainable options and striving to be net zero by 2030.     Recognising great performance is a key part of our culture. Our Awards schemes recognise and reward our people’s brilliant achievements.    We have a truly flexible working environment with a wide range of flexible, hybrid and agile working arrangements. Conversations about flexible working have always been – and will continue to be – actively encouraged here.   We want to ensure everyone has the opportunity to perform their best during interviews, so if you require any reasonable adjustments that would make you more comfortable, please let us know so we can do our best to support you.