Hiring: Principal, Retail Operations Company: Catalyze Labs Location: Los Angeles Metropolitan Area Job Posted Time: 2026-09-02 18:01:31 Target Skills & Keywords : Chai, HBase, Make, Rust, Shell About the job Experience: •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. Required Skills: •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. Compensation: •$230,000 •$300,000 Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!