Director, Divisional Technology Lead

Centric Brands is a leading lifestyle brand collective that designs, sources, markets and sells high quality products in multiple segments, including women’s, men’s and kid’s apparel, accessories, entertainment and beauty. Centric Brands is focused on our customers and our brands that will drive the company’s future growth. We are defined by innovation as we seize new opportunities and thrive in an environment informed by creativity and thinking that is both analytical and outside the box. Centric Brands reflects a team built on respect, for others and for the hard work it takes to achieve our goals and build our bright future together.

Centric Brands is a house of brands that sells mainly through wholesale. Each division runs its own customers, seasonal calendar, and P&L, and relies on shared enterprise technology to execute.

The Divisional IT Lead reports hard line into IT and sits within the division’s leadership team, working day to day with the President and supporting the entire divisional team. This is an individual contributor role with no direct reports: you lead through influence across the division, IT, and the broader enterprise. You are the division’s single point of contact for IT and IT’s single point of contact for the division. You make sure IT initiatives are communicated, scaled, and trained so they are adopted, manage and prioritize the division’s day-to-day requests, and act as a change agent who finds innovation and shares it across the division and Centric Brands.

Executive partnership and liaison

• Serve as the trusted technology advisor to the President and the division leadership team and take part in the division’s leadership meetings and business reviews.
• Act as the single point of contact between IT and the division. Represent the division’s needs, questions, and escalations within IT, and make sure IT changes and decisions reach the division with clear context and impact.
• Build working relationships across all levels of the division, including commercial, design, planning, sourcing, supply chain, finance, and e-commerce.
• Know the division’s seasonal calendar, key business moments, and pain points well enough to time IT work around them.
• Represent the division’s needs in IT forums. Explain IT decisions and trade-offs back to the division with the reasons.
• Lead through influence, not authority. Align IT product owners and the IT applications, data, infrastructure, security, and service desk teams on the division’s needs. Those teams keep ownership of execution.

Demand management and prioritization

• Own intake for ad hoc requests from the division. Capture, log, and track each request through to resolution.
• Triage and prioritize requests by business impact, urgency, and effort. Agree priorities with the President and division leadership and set clear expectations on timing.
• Combine duplicate requests, point people to tools and capabilities that already exist, and resolve simple requests directly.
• Spot recurring issues and requests and raise them to IT as candidates for a lasting fix or a larger initiative.
• Report regularly to the President, division leadership, and IT on request volume, status, themes, adoption, and business value delivered, through a monthly demand review and a quarterly business review.
• Define success measures for each division initiative up front, and report adoption and business value realized (for example, time saved, cycle time reduced, or cost avoided) in the quarterly business review.

Communication, scaling, and training

• Turn IT initiatives into plain-language communication for the division: what is changing, why, when, and what each team needs to do.
• Plan and lead rollout of IT initiatives in the division, from readiness checks and pilots to scaling across brands and teams.
• Design and deliver training, including sessions, quick-reference guides, and office hours, and build a network of super users who support their peers.
• Keep division stakeholders involved through discovery, design, testing, and go-live.
• Track adoption after go-live, collect feedback, and close the gaps with follow-up training or fixes from IT.
• Lead communication to the division during major incidents or delivery risks that affect it.

Change and innovation

• Act as a change agent. Influence leaders and teams across the division to understand, accept, and adopt new ways of working.
• Find innovation and innovators in the division: people, teams, and ideas that use technology, data, automation, or AI to work better.
• Lead AI adoption in the division: identify high-value use cases, move successful pilots into everyday use at scale, and promote Centric’s responsible-use guidelines so teams use approved tools.
• Share what works at scale, across the division and the broader Centric Brands organization, through demos, case studies, and communities of practice.
• Connect with Divisional IT Leads in other divisions to reuse solutions and avoid solving the same problem twice.
• Bring new ideas to the division before anyone files a request and help test promising ones quickly.

• Bachelor’s degree in business, information systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
• 10+ years in IT business partnership, technology change and adoption, or enterprise application ownership, with sustained work alongside brand presidents, general managers, or senior business leaders.
• Proven ability to lead through influence as an individual contributor, driving outcomes across large organizations without direct authority.
• Track record of rolling out technology changes and driving adoption through communication and training.
• Experience managing a queue of business requests and prioritizing competing demands.
• Enough grounding in solution design, data, and integrations to challenge requirements, estimates, and vendor proposals with credibility.
• Executive presence and strong communication and facilitation skills, with the ability to explain technical topics to audiences from the President to front-line teams.
• Hands-on familiarity with generative AI tools and practical experience helping business teams adopt them.
• Experience in a multi-brand or multi-division business, ideally in apparel, footwear, consumer products, beauty, or retail.
• Working knowledge of applications common to consumer brands: ERP (SAP or similar), PLM, planning, wholesale order management, EDI and retailer compliance, e-commerce, CRM, BI, and collaboration tools.
• A plus: change management (such as Prosci), business relationship management (BRMP), ITIL, Lean Six Sigma, or agile certification.

In return, we provide an industry-competitive salary, along with a comprehensive benefits plan (medical, dental, vision) that includes a matching 401 (k), Summer Fridays, generous PTO, merchandise discounts, excellent career development opportunities, and a work environment that reflects our industry leadership. Our social impact program, Centric Cares, focuses on volunteerism to make a difference in communities we live and work in and our D&I committee is shaping the future of diversity, equity and inclusion at Centric Brands though workshops, resources and inspiring conversation. 

Salary Range: $138,000-$173,000

At Centric Brands, we believe our people are our greatest asset, and we seek to structure competitive compensation offers to ensure that we are able to attract and retain the best talent.  Our job postings include an annual base salary range at the time of employment.  The stated base salary range represents our good faith estimate as to what candidates are likely to expect, and we tailor our offers within the range based on several factors, including the selected candidate's educational and professional experience, industry knowledge, location, technical and communication skills, and other factors that may prove relevant during the selection process.  Base salary is a part of a total compensation package, which, depending on the position, may also include commission earnings, annual bonus and other Centric Brands sponsored benefit programs. 

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Centric Brands is an Equal Opportunity Employer

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Please note that Centric Brands will only reach out to interview, make an offer of employment or conduct onboarding activities for candidates who have applied through our careers site. When interviewing for a position, the candidate experience will include live interaction, such as a video conference or telephone call, with a Recruiter and/or company employee(s). We will never ask for any money or payments from applicants at any point in the recruitment process. Be aware of suspicious recruitment activity. If you think you are a victim of an employment scam, you may contact your local law enforcement agency and/or visit the Federal Trade Commission website here: https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/job-scams.