Company: Trainz.com
Location: On-site, Flowery Branch, Georgia
Department: Information Technology / Product & Software Delivery
Reports To: CTO
Employment Type: Full-time Employee
Job Summary
As the Technical Product & Delivery Lead, you will lead the business-facing product, business analysis, delivery, and functional quality functions supporting Trainz's custom software portfolio.
This is a hands-on, multidisciplinary role, particularly while the team remains small. You will personally contribute across product planning, business analysis, delivery coordination, quality assurance, release management, and problem solving while also providing team leadership. You will work closely with the CTO, Lead Software Engineer, Development Team, business leaders, and operational departments to ensure software initiatives address the right business problems, are clearly defined and prioritized, and are successfully delivered and adopted.
Environment
You will support a highly complex technology environment that is operationally critical to Trainz's e-commerce, marketplace, warehouse, and back-office operations.
Trainz thinks and develops data-first. SQL Server is central to the company's custom systems, with substantial business logic implemented through relational schemas, views, stored procedures, transactions, scheduled jobs, and data-driven integrations. Understanding how business processes are represented in data is therefore important to analysis, testing, and problem investigation.
The technology environment includes:
- TRICIA, a highly complex custom ERP supporting product attribution, procurement, collectibles, inventory, orders, pricing, purchasing, receiving, fulfillment, paperless picking, shipping, and reporting
- Custom applications developed with .NET, C#, ASP.NET, Angular, SQL Server, T-SQL, REST APIs, and related technologies
- Marketplace and retail e-commerce operations supporting approximately $25 million in annual revenue across eBay, Trainz.com, SellMyTrains.com, and LindysTrains.com
- Integrations using REST, SOAP, GraphQL, Azure Service Bus, scheduled processing, database workflows, and file-based data exchange
- Approximately 100 custom reports and more than 120 SaaS platforms, software suites, cloud services, and vendor-supported applications
- A primarily on-premises environment with services in Azure and AWS and a distributed Development Team located primarily in Egypt
This role requires regular interaction with departments throughout Trainz to understand business processes, observe operational workflows, resolve ambiguity, coordinate testing, and support successful adoption of software changes.
This is a full-time, on-site position in Flowery Branch, Georgia. Occasional after-hours work may be required for major releases, urgent production issues, or time-sensitive implementations.
Work Style
At Trainz, we believe great companies are built by great people. Our People First culture emphasizes learning, integrity, excellence, and work-life balance.
The Product & Software Delivery function operates in a high-trust, collaborative environment where priorities may change quickly and important business and system knowledge may exist as accumulated team context rather than formal documentation.
This role is best suited for resources who:
- Absorb and connect complex business, operational, technical, data, and historical context
- Ask precise questions and identify missing requirements, assumptions, dependencies, and edge cases
- Take ownership of ambiguous initiatives and drive them toward clear, practical, and testable outcomes
- Communicate effectively with executives, managers, operational employees, engineers, vendors, and consultants
- Add enough structure to improve clarity and accountability without creating unnecessary bureaucracy
Key Responsibilities
Team Leadership & Supervision
- Operate primarily as a hands-on, multidisciplinary generalist while the team remains small, directly contributing across product planning, business analysis, delivery, testing, release support, and problem investigation
- Lead a small product and functional quality team, currently including the Product Catalog & Associate Discovery Analyst, with the potential to supervise additional QA, Business Analysis, and Project Management roles as the function grows
- Assign and prioritize work, set clear expectations, monitor results, and help team members resolve barriers
- Coach employees, provide regular feedback, and support performance and professional development
- Support hiring, onboarding, cross-training, and coverage planning as the function grows
Product Planning & Portfolio Management
- Manage the intake, organization, preparation, and ongoing maintenance of the custom software backlog
- Work with the CTO and business leaders to clarify desired outcomes, business value, scope, urgency, dependencies, and success measures and support product and portfolio decisions with clear options, trade-offs, risks, and recommendations
- Recommend priorities and sequencing based on business value, risk, effort, dependencies, technical needs, and available capacity
- Maintain visibility into committed projects, maintenance work, technical debt, support needs, and future initiatives while limiting excessive work in progress
- Manage approved priorities, resolve routine sequencing decisions, and escalate material conflicts or scope changes to the CTO
Business Analysis, Data & Requirements
- Lead discovery sessions and observe operational workflows to understand business problems, current processes, constraints, and desired outcomes
- Translate business needs into clear requirements, workflows, business rules, data requirements, and acceptance criteria
- Define sources of truth, data relationships, lifecycle and history requirements, reporting impacts, integration needs, permissions, and failure scenarios
- Work with the Lead Software Engineer to evaluate feasibility, implementation options, data-model implications, dependencies, and trade-offs
- Maintain concise decision records and document important business rules, assumptions, and historical context
Product & Engineering Partnership
- Serve as the primary business-facing partner to the Lead Software Engineer throughout the software delivery lifecycle; strategic priorities, major product decisions, and significant investment or scope decisions remain with the CTO and appropriate business leadership
- Translate approved business priorities and product decisions into clearly defined outcomes, requirements, acceptance criteria, business testing, and operational readiness
- Partner with the Lead Software Engineer on estimation, sequencing, technical options, delivery risks, and implementation planning
- Respect engineering ownership of architecture, technical design, developer assignments, engineering practices, code quality, and implementation decisions
- Coordinate developer assignments and engineering capacity through the Lead Software Engineer
Delivery Coordination
- Coordinate initiatives from discovery through requirements, development, testing, release, adoption, and post-release review
- Maintain practical delivery plans covering milestones, dependencies, decisions, responsibilities, risks, and expected outcomes
- Coordinate work across business stakeholders, Development, KTLO, vendors, consultants, and external platforms
- Track status, scope, dependencies, decisions, and barriers, and drive actions needed to maintain or restore progress
- Provide clear status and risk communication without introducing unnecessary administrative overhead
Quality Assurance & Release Management
- Lead functional quality, business acceptance, and release readiness for custom software changes
- Develop and coordinate risk-based test plans covering functional, integration, regression, workflow, and data validation
- Use SQL and other tools to validate calculations, data transformations, database updates, integrations, and downstream reporting
- Ensure defects are clearly documented with sufficient information to support prioritization, investigation, and resolution
- Coordinate user acceptance testing, training, release communications, rollout timing, and production validation
- Confirm high-risk releases have appropriate approvals, contingency plans, rollback procedures, and escalation paths
- Partner with engineering on automated testing while remaining responsible for functional coverage and business acceptance
Product Catalog & Discovery Oversight
- Provide supervisory direction for product catalog, taxonomy, search, navigation, discovery, and related product-data analysis
- Align catalog and discovery initiatives with customer experience, merchandising, operational, and technology objectives
- Coordinate priorities and requirements with Marketing, Production, Collectibles, Development, and other affected departments
- Coach and develop the Product Catalog & Associate Discovery Analyst in product analysis, requirements, testing, and documentation
Stakeholder Communication & Change Adoption
- Serve as a primary point of coordination between business departments and the Development Team
- Translate business needs into language that supports technical planning and technical constraints into practical business terms
- Facilitate decisions when stakeholders have conflicting requirements, priorities, or expectations
- Set realistic expectations regarding scope, sequencing, timing, trade-offs, and delivery risk
- Ensure affected users receive appropriate communication, documentation, training, and support for significant changes
Documentation & Process Improvement
- Document important business processes, system behavior, product decisions, data rules, acceptance criteria, and operational dependencies
- Convert institutional and historical knowledge into concise, maintainable documentation
- Identify documentation gaps that create delivery, testing, support, onboarding, or continuity risk
- Evaluate recurring delays, defects, handoff failures, and sources of rework and recommend practical improvements
- Establish clear definitions for work readiness, completion, acceptance, and release approval
- Identify and evaluate appropriate tools, including artificial intelligence, to improve analysis, requirements, documentation, testing, and delivery
Skills & Qualifications
Education & Experience
- Bachelor's degree in Business, Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Operations, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
- 7+ years of combined experience in technical product ownership, business analysis, software delivery, project management, quality assurance, or related business-systems roles
- Experience leading complex custom software initiatives from business discovery through production release and adoption
- Experience providing work direction, supervision, coaching, or functional leadership to employees or project teams
- Experience supporting custom ERP, e-commerce, warehouse, order-management, or other operationally critical business systems
- Experience working directly with software engineers, technical leads, business leaders, and operational stakeholders
- Experience with distributed or offshore development teams and retail, e-commerce, or warehouse operations is a plus
Product, Analysis & Delivery
- Strong ability to discover, analyze, and document complex business processes and software requirements
- Experience developing functional requirements, workflows, business rules, acceptance criteria, test plans, and release plans
- Ability to distinguish business outcomes from requested features or proposed technical solutions
- Strong prioritization skills with the ability to evaluate business value, risk, urgency, dependencies, and effort
- Experience coordinating multiple software initiatives, stakeholders, dependencies, testing activities, and releases
- Working knowledge of Agile, Kanban, or related methods, with the judgment to apply them pragmatically
SQL, Data Analysis & Data Architecture
- Practical working knowledge of Microsoft SQL Server and T-SQL
- Ability to write queries using joins, filtering, grouping, aggregates, subqueries
- Ability to read and understand relational schemas, views, stored procedures, and existing data-processing logic
- Understanding of relational data architecture principles, including entities, keys, relationships, referential integrity, normalization, and transactions
- Understanding of source-of-truth ownership, derived data, data lineage, history, auditability, and data lifecycle
- Ability to use SQL to investigate defects, validate business rules and software behavior, reconcile data, and confirm expected results
Technical Fluency & Quality Assurance
- Ability to understand complex software systems at the logical level, including, APIs, integrations, data flows, authentication, permissions, and implementation trade-offs
- Ability to communicate effectively with engineers about system behavior, technical constraints, defects, and implementation options
- Experience performing functional, integration, regression, workflow, and data-validation testing
- Familiarity with any of .NET, C#, Angular, Shopify, eBay, Azure, AWS, automated testing, or similar technologies is a plus
- Hands-on Software-development experience is a plus
Supervision, Judgment & Communication
- Ability to supervise a small team while remaining directly involved in product, analysis, delivery, and quality assurance work
- Ability to establish priorities, assign work, coach employees, monitor results, and maintain accountability
- Ability to lead across departments, resolve ambiguity, manage conflicting priorities, and maintain momentum
- Sound judgment when balancing business value, technical constraints, quality, urgency, cost, and operational risk
- Strong written, verbal, facilitation, and documentation skills in English
- Ability to build trust and maintain productive relationships with business, engineering, infrastructure, vendors, and consultants
Additional Requirements
- Ability to pass Trainz’s drug-free workplace screening
- Must be a U.S. citizen or legally authorized to work in the United States
