Functional Analyst - Digital Services Management at Costco in Issaquah, WA

Costco IT is responsible for the technical future of Costco Wholesale, the third largest retailer in the world with wholesale operations in fourteen countries. Despite our size and explosive international expansion, we continue to provide a family, employee centric atmosphere in which our employees thrive and succeed. As proof, Costco ranks eighth in Forbes “World’s Best Employers”.

This is an environment unlike anything in the high-tech world and the secret of Costco’s success is its culture. The value Costco puts on its employees is well documented in articles from a variety of publishers including Bloomberg and Forbes. Our employees and our members come FIRST. Costco is well known for its generosity and community service and has won many awards for its philanthropy. The company joins with its employees to take an active role in volunteering by sponsoring many opportunities to help others.

Come join the Costco Wholesale IT family. Costco IT is a dynamic, fast-paced environment, working through exciting transformation efforts. We are building the next generation retail environment where you will be surrounded by dedicated and highly professional employees.

Functional Analysts are responsible for: understanding the requirements of users; understanding requirements for team/domain specific systems; performing technical system and data analysis; developing specifications representing both user interface and data interface requirements; interfacing with the vendor on technical issues, providing input into technical designs; and assisting with the configuration of team/domain specific applications.

The Digital Services Management team is highly visible and critical to the success of our website business by enabling Costco’s current and future growth plans. This team works closely with external vendors and internal IT teams to establish, drive, and ensure that our service level objectives are met and effectively improve service uptime and performance.

The Functional Analyst for Digital Services Management will partner with various teams to gather and analyze data and determine actionable insights to facilitate discussions around risks, priorities, and targeted results. Success requires the ability to visualize and develop accurate and meaningful dashboards for key stakeholders, including trend identification, metric definition, and the related efforts to decrease service disruption. Additionally, this role will own the successful measurement and performance of service targets ensuring provisions for accountability of vendors is documented in their contracts. Follow up on these contractual and fiduciary obligations in the event of an exceeded error budget is critical. This role will drive collaboration with cross teams to identify and document vendor opportunities to improve vendor services.

If you want to be a part of one of the worldwide BEST companies “to work for”, simply apply and let your career be reimagined.

ROLE

● Analyzes and delivers complex cross-functional business requirements and process flows.

● Performs gap analysis between as-is and to-be processes, and makes recommendations on areas for continual process improvement.

● Assists teammates in growing and developing the skills necessary to elicit and translate requirements into functional design.

● Executes and leads the development of technical specifications by collaborating with technical and non-technical teams, translating functional designs into technical designs, validating macro designs and reviewing micro designs.

● Develops technical specifications by collaborating with technical and non-technical teams, translating functional designs into technical designs, validating macro designs and reviewing micro designs.

● Designs, develops, and executes testing protocols to include unit testing, integration testing, and system testing, as driven by the requirements.

● Performs systems and data analysis on applications to understand functional design requirements determining how a system should work and how changes in conditions, operations, and the environment will affect outcomes.

● Manages, defines, drives, and executes as needed, the implementation of configurations across applications and interfaces.

● Assists teammates in growing and developing the skills necessary to grasp team application concepts and tool suite.

● Identifies and resolves problems often anticipating issues before they occur or before they grow; develops and evaluates options and implements solutions.

● Participates in the development of deployment and release work plan tasks within a phase.

● Coordinates, plans, designs, and produces deliverables for the training phase.

● Develops and ensures adherence to establishment of standards, best practices, governances, and patterns.

● Extracts and formats data to perform analysis and to identify anomalies to determine data patterns.

● Creates accessible visualizations that quickly and clearly communicate their intent.

● Identifies areas where data analysis could reveal hidden value and works with management to explore it.

● Performs data analysis to support and move forward any area of Costco’s Ecommerce business.

● Identifies and documents incident and problem trends and progress in relation to vendor services.

● Provides contract knowledge and drives ongoing value from the supplier through contract negotiations, changes, reviews, and terminations. Ensures supplier's contractual compliance.

● Works with Ecommerce IT Management on contract requests, revisions, and extensions, ensuring they align with projected forecasts for each vendor.

● Coordinates with the IT Business teams to ensure timeliness of contract execution, accurate budgets, and financial payment.

● Makes effective use of mathematical and statistical techniques to analyze and interpret data.

● Communicates with internal clients, peers, and management to understand clear scope for all requests.

● Ensures timely, clear communication regarding high priority issues with the appropriate stakeholders.

● Creates executive level dashboards and presentations to represent the state of eComm Services Management.

● Develops reports and dashboards in ServiceNow for the purpose of extraction, sharing or presentation.

● Presents findings and recommendations to business users in clear terms with meaningful interpretation and actionable insights.

● Collaborates with appropriate business and IT stakeholders to determine root cause and problem identification, and as appropriate, enhancement identification for future development work.

● Ensures solutions follow development life cycle, conforming to requirements and quality standards.

● Defines, captures, and validates IT requirements and other artifacts, ensuring appropriate stakeholders are involved.

● Provides technical assistance and troubleshooting by effectively responding to inquiries. Analyzes internal IS customer needs and priorities and initiates delivery efforts.

● Documents and manages risks, issues, assumptions, and constraints impacting delivery efforts.

● Develops and coordinates legal/compliance, operational controls, and associated metrics to measure success.

● Develops and implements standards, processes, and procedures for new technology solutions, to ensure newer solutions will not negatively impact current service commitments.

● Participates in periodic audits for solutions, planning, and delivery functions.

REQUIRED

● 5+ years’ experience understanding trends in data sets and leveraging key data points to drive decision-making.

● 3+ years’ experience with monitoring tools, such as Splunk, Tivoli, and Dynatrace.

● 3+ years’ experience automating toil in IT environments using scripting languages (Powershell, Bash).

● Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with the ability to effectively negotiate with other teams to create a mutually beneficial solution.

● Experience with negotiating and managing supplier contracts.

● Able to collect, organize, analyze, and disseminate information with attention to detail and accuracy.

● Detail-oriented and strong problem-solving skills, with the ability to analyze a situation for potential future problems.

● Experience deriving insights from data; able to think creatively to logically envision relationships between data.

● Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, interacting across multiple departments and levels within Costco.

● Able to communicate technical information in layman’s terms through summaries, presentations, graphs, etc.

● Proven ability to handle diverse projects at once and meet deadlines in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities.

● Resourceful, self-motivated, and accountable team player with a constructive attitude.

● Ability to quickly learn new technology; dedication to developing deep knowledge of available data and data tools, while managing multiple efforts.

● Ability to conduct monthly meetings with stakeholders to drive increased availability in identified trends.

● Intellectually inquisitive nature with the ability to be open minded to varying opinions.

● Innovative, creative, and extremely responsive in respect to service quality and ways in which it can be improved.

● Good understanding of corporate IT policies, procedures, and standards.

● Knowledge of:

● IT strategies, customers, and services provided.

● Costco’s core business environment related to eCommerce, Merchandising, Warehouse Operations, and company philosophies.

● Service analysis and other tools: ServiceNow, Google Apps, Smartsheets.

● Able to support off-hours work as required, including weekends, holidays, and 24/7 on call responsibilities on a rotational basis.

We offer a comprehensive package of benefits including paid time off, health benefits - medical/dental/vision/hearing aid/pharmacy/behavioral health/employee assistance, health care reimbursement account, dependent care assistance plan, short-term disability and long-term disability insurance, AD&D insurance, life insurance, 401(k), stock purchase plan to eligible employees.

Costco is committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace. Costco is an equal opportunity employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard of race, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, protected veteran status, disability, age, or any other legally protected status. If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request to IT-Recruiting@costco.com

If hired, you will be required to provide proof of authorization to work in the United States. Applicants and employees for this position will not be sponsored for work authorization, including, but not limited to H1-B visas.

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