At Five Below our growth is a result of the people who embrace our purpose: We know life is way better when you are free to Let Go & Have Fun in an amazing experience, filled with unlimited possibilities, priced so low, you can always say yes to the newest, coolest stuff! Just ask any of our over 27,000 associates who work at Five Below and they’ll tell you there’s no other place like it. It all starts with our purpose and then, The Five Below Way, which is our values and behaviors that each and every associate believes in.
It’s all about culture at Five Below, making this a place that can inspire you as much as you inspire us with big ideas, super energy, passion, and the ability to make the workplace a WOWplace!
Position Summary
Five Below is seeking a Solutions Architect II to lead the design and implementation of our enterprise omnichannel initiatives, with a primary focus on Manhattan Active Omni (MAO) and the broader omnichannel order lifecycle. This role defines and drives end-to-end architecture for order capture, distributed order management (DOM), fulfillment orchestration, inventory visibility, and post-purchase experiences - ensuring all solutions are scalable, resilient, and aligned with our retail and customer-experience strategies.
You will serve as the bridge between business strategy and technical execution, translating complex omnichannel opportunities into actionable architectural blueprints that deliver measurable business value. This is a hands-on technical role: you will both design architectures and dive into configurations, integrations, and systems - partnering with teams across technology, merchandising, supply chain, stores, and e-commerce to bring production-ready omnichannel capabilities to life.
The role demands deep, application-level fluency that goes well beyond general OMS familiarity - owning integration design, tracing data flows end-to-end, and tuning system configurations hand-in-hand with engineering, product, and operations partners.
This role mandates active use of AI productivity tools - including Cursor, Claude, Glean, and equivalent platforms - to accelerate delivery and model best practices for the broader engineering organization.
1. Omnichannel Architecture & Strategy
- Define and own the enterprise omnichannel architecture, aligning with Five Below's business priorities and multi-year technology roadmap.
- Develop reference architectures, integration patterns, and design standards for order management, fulfillment orchestration, and inventory availability.
- Translate retail business problems - spanning stores, e-commerce, digital, supply chain, and customer experience - into scalable omnichannel solution blueprints.
- Partner with business, product, and engineering leaders to identify and prioritize high-impact omnichannel capabilities such as BOPIS, BORIS, Same-day fulfillment, Ship-from-store, and endless aisle.
- Champion API-first, event-driven, and microservices design principles as the default approach before evaluating packaged commercial alternatives.
2. Manhattan Active Omni Design & Implementation
- Lead the architecture, configuration, and implementation of Manhattan Active Omni - including Order Management, Store Fulfillment, and Inventory & Order Visibility - across all fulfillment channels.
- Design order routing, sourcing rules, fulfillment workflows, and exception management within Manhattan Active Omni to optimize cost-to-serve and customer promise accuracy.
- Establish configuration and extension standards for Manhattan Active Omni, including orchestration process flows, service mappings, fulfillment strategies, and business rule frameworks.
- Define upgrade, patch, and release management standards for Manhattan Active Omni environments to ensure production stability and continuous improvement.
- Evaluate and advise on adjacent platform expansions - including commerce, merchandising, and warehouse management systems - and their integration with the OMS.
3. System Integration & API Design
- Architect end-to-end integration patterns connecting OMS to all upstream and downstream retail systems: e-commerce platforms, POS, WMS, ERP, CRM, carrier/logistics providers, and customer-facing touchpoints.
- Define API standards (REST, GraphQL, event-driven via Kafka or equivalent) for order, inventory, fulfillment, and return data flows.
- Design real-time inventory visibility solutions - bridging store, DC, and in-transit inventory - to power accurate available-to-promise (ATP) and omnichannel order routing decisions.
- Lead integration design for carrier management, last-mile delivery, and third-party logistics (3PL) partners.
- Establish integration governance including API versioning, schema standards, error handling, retry logic, and dead-letter management.
4. Fulfillment & Store Operations Architecture
- Architect fulfillment capabilities - BOPIS, curbside pickup, ship-from-store, ship-to-store, and endless aisle - on Manhattan Active Omni Store Fulfillment, ensuring store associate experience and operational feasibility are first-class design inputs.
- Design the distributed order management (DOM) logic to dynamically route orders across DCs, stores, and drop-ship vendors based on inventory proximity, capacity, and cost rules.
- Define returns and reverse logistics architectures - including in-store returns of online orders, carrier returns, and vendor returns - aligned to customer experience and operational efficiency goals.
- Partner with Store Technology and Operations to ensure Manhattan Active Omni Store Fulfillment workflows - pick, pack, stage, customer handoff, and in-store returns - integrate seamlessly with POS (Aptos or equivalent) and store associate tooling.
- Drive fraud management and payment capture architecture within the order lifecycle, partnering with Finance and Risk teams.
5. Performance, Scalability & Observability
- Define non-functional requirements (NFRs) for all OMS and omnichannel systems: throughput, latency SLOs, availability targets, and disaster recovery posture.
- Establish an observability framework for omnichannel systems covering real-time monitoring, SLO/SLA alerting, order pipeline health, and integration fault detection.
- Design load testing, capacity planning, and peak readiness (holiday, back-to-school) strategies for OMS and fulfillment infrastructure.
- Partner with Platform Engineering to embed observability, logging, and distributed tracing as first-class requirements in every omnichannel system.
- Establish runbooks and automated alerting for critical failure scenarios - including order routing failures, inventory sync outages, and fulfillment SLA breaches.
6. Data Architecture & Reporting
- Define the omnichannel data model - covering orders, shipments, returns, inventory events, and customer interactions - to support real-time operational reporting and strategic analytics.
- Architect data pipelines that feed omnichannel operational metrics into enterprise data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, or equivalent) for reporting and advanced analytics.
- Partner with Data Engineering to ensure order and fulfillment data is available for customer-facing use cases - including order status, tracking, and self-service returns - and internal KPI dashboards.
- Define data governance standards for omnichannel datasets including ownership, retention, access controls, and PII handling.
7. Technology Evaluation, Governance & Vendor Management
- Lead build-vs-buy-vs-configure decisions for omnichannel capabilities, weighing Manhattan Active Omni extensibility against SaaS alternatives and custom microservices.
- Evaluate and recommend platform investments - including e-commerce platforms (Salesforce Commerce Cloud, commercetools, or equivalent), OMS add-ons, and carrier/logistics APIs.
- Define vendor selection criteria and lead RFP/POC processes for omnichannel technology investments.
- Establish technology governance: architecture review boards (ARBs), decision records (ADRs), and standards documentation for the omnichannel platform.
- Partner with Security, Legal, and Enterprise Architecture to align omnichannel solutions with data privacy, PCI compliance, and corporate risk standards.
8. Technical Leadership & Delivery
- Work closely with Software Engineers, Integration Engineers, QA, and platform teams to ensure architectures are production-ready and executable within agile delivery cycles.
- Provide hands-on guidance during implementation phases - including reference configurations, API contracts, data schemas, and infrastructure patterns.
- Lead architectural reviews and design sessions, ensuring solutions meet performance, scalability, security, cost, and maintainability requirements before build begins.
- Mentor and upskill engineering teams on omnichannel patterns, Manhattan Active Omni best practices, and integration design principles.
- Align delivery roadmaps with business program timelines, proactively surfacing technical risks and trade-off decisions to product and program leadership.
- 9+ years of experience in software or enterprise architecture, with 5+ years focused on Order Management, Omnichannel, or Supply Chain systems in retail or e-commerce.
- Hands-on experience implementing or