Principal, Retail Operations

About Catalyze Labs

Catalyze Labs is an AI-native systems and product builder. We partner with enterprises to design and deploy production AI systems that sit inside real operations; often messy, regulated, and deeply human.

Our work spans retail, healthcare, financial services, logistics, and enterprise operations. We don’t sell tools or experiments. We build end-to-end systems that combine AI, automation, software, and people, and we stay involved until they work in the real world.

Our client counterparts vary widely depending on the organization and problem: CTOs, COOs, product leaders, engineers, operators, and functional VPs. What they have in common is responsibility for outcomes.

The Role

We are looking for someone who has run something physical - a distribution center, a region of stores, a supply chain - and then went and learned how software actually gets built.

That combination is rare, and it is the entire job.

Catalyze Labs builds AI decision systems for large retailers: the layer that sits on top of the warehouse system, the workforce system, the order management system, and makes the calls that span all of them. Not dashboards, not a platform we license you. Working software, built inside our clients' environments, owned by them when we leave.

Our clients are operators. The people we sit with run stores and DCs and have watched a decade of technology projects arrive with a lot of confidence and leave with very little to show. They can tell within ten minutes whether the person across the table has ever done the job. You would be that person.

What you would do

• Own the client relationship at the operator level
  • not the steering committee, the people running the shift. Earn enough trust that they tell you where the real friction is instead of the sanctioned version.
• Find the decision worth building. Every engagement starts with two weeks inside the operation and one flat data extract, and ends with an honest read on whether the opportunity is real. Sometimes the honest read is no. You deliver that one too.
• Define the measure before the build starts. Payroll hours per store week at constant service. Cost per unit shipped. Split-shipment rate. You agree the number with the client up front and you are accountable to it.
• Lead a small pod
  • data engineers, AI engineers, an operations analyst - embedded alongside client teams. You are not managing from a deck; you are in the building with them.
• Make adoption real. Most of these systems fail at the last mile, when a district manager decides the recommendation is wrong and stops looking at it. Preventing that is operations work, and it is yours.

What you have done

• 12–20 years , with real accountability for a physical operation: DC general manager, regional supply chain leader, store district or regional manager, or equivalent. You have owned a P&L or a labor budget and missed it at least once.
• Crossed into technology . Three to five years at a supply-chain or retail-technology company, or you led the operations side of a serious systems deployment — WMS, OMS, workforce management, store systems. You know why these programs slip.
• Fluent, not technical . You do not need to write production code. You do need to read a data model, argue with an engineer about what a "unit" means, and know when a model's answer is operationally absurd.
• Credible in a break room and in a boardroom , in the same day, without changing who you are.

Who this is not forThis is not a consulting role and we are not looking for a consulting profile. If your last several years produced recommendations rather than running systems, this will not be a fit, and the interview will surface that quickly. We build. The deliverable is software that works on a Tuesday in a store, not a strategy.

How to apply

Skip the cover letter. Send a short note answering two things:

• Walk us through a store week or a DC shift, hour by hour. Be specific and boring. We want the version with the actual times in it.
• Tell us about a rollout you got wrong ; what you believed going in, what actually happened, and what it cost.

Apply here on LinkedIn or email [email protected].

Catalyze Labs is an equal opportunity employer. The posted range reflects base salary for this role in California; final offer depends on experience.