Director of Supply Chain Applications

Company Description

At National Vision we believe everyone deserves to see their best to live their best. We help people by making quality eye care and eyewear more affordable and accessible. National Vision is one of the largest optical retail companies in the United States with over 1,200 stores. We operate four retail brands: America’s Best Contacts & Eyeglasses, Eyeglass World, and Vista Optical inside select Fred Meyer stores and on select military bases. We offer an innovative culture where training is a priority, hard work is praised, and career growth is a reality.

We are hiring for a Director of Supply Chain Applications to join our growing team!

Job Description

The Director, Supply Chain Applications leads the design, development, implementation, support, and modernization of the technology platforms that enable the company's supply chain operations. This role is accountable for the performance and long-term direction of the supply chain application portfolio and works closely with business and technology leaders to translate operational priorities into reliable, scalable solutions. The Director also guides the transition from legacy platforms to modern cloud-based solutions while maintaining business continuity, managing technology risk, and ensuring critical systems continue to support the company's evolving needs.

What Would You Do? The Specifics.

• Oversees the development of critical applications and technology to support the company’s long-term goals.
• Owns the supply chain application portfolio, including strategy, delivery, maintenance, production support, and lifecycle planning.
• Oversees an extensively customized JDA environment running on IBM i (AS/400 / iSeries), supporting the applications and business processes that keep our supply chain operating.
• Provides technical direction and oversight for the customized JDA platform, including RPG programs, CL processing, database interactions, batch workflows, and interfaces, while ensuring sound architecture, maintainability, and operational reliability.
• Reviews complex code and application changes, assess downstream impacts, and guide troubleshooting of production issues.
• Oversees source control, change management, and release processes within ALDON, including dependency management, approvals, environment promotion, deployment readiness, and rollback planning.
• Serves as a technology partner to leaders across Supply Chain, Distribution, Merchandising, Finance translating operational requirements into scalable solutions, prioritized roadmaps, and informed technology investments.
• Documents critical business rules, customizations, interfaces, and operational dependencies to preserve institutional knowledge and reduce reliance on individual experts.
• Defines and maintains application development and support standards across solution design, coding, testing, documentation, production support, release management, and change control.
• Partners with Infrastructure and Operations teams to strengthen application availability, performance, security, disaster recovery, business continuity, and batch-processing reliability.
• Leads application modernization and transformation planning, including application discovery, requirements analysis, process assessment, solution evaluation, data mapping, migration planning, and transition readiness for future platform changes.
• Communicates application health, delivery progress, risks, and investment recommendations to business and technology leadership.
• Assists in the development, review, and compliance of IT policies and procedures including project approval process, signature authority policy, information security policies and processes, and disaster recovery and business continuity processes.

Qualifications

Work Experience

• 9+ years related experience working on IBM i (AS/400 / iSeries) (Required) and
• Experience sunsetting a legacy JDA/IBM environment and migrating to a modern SaaS solution such as Oracle (Preferred)
• Demonstrated leadership of application development and support teams responsible for business-critical systems. (Required)
• Demonstrated success leading enterprise application portfolios that support supply chain, distribution, retail, merchandising, or other large-scale operational functions. (Required)
• Extensive experience supporting and enhancing highly customized packaged applications with complex business rules, interfaces, and integration dependencies. (Required)
• Proven experience leading supply chain or merchandising platform modernization, replacement, or migration initiatives within complex operational environments. (Required)

Education

• Four year college degree or equivalent experience. in information technology, computer science, or a related field (Required)

Additional Skills

• Extensive hands-on experience with RPG development on IBM i, including the ability to read, debug, evaluate, and provide technical direction for heavily customized legacy code. (Required)
• Strong familiarity with older fixed-format RPG and experience with RPG III, RPG IV / ILE RPG, and newer RPG approaches, as applicable to the environment. (Required)
• Strong working knowledge of CL, Db2 for i, DDS, physical and logical files, libraries, jobs, job queues, job logs, and batch-processing environments. (Required)
• Substantial hands-on experience using ALDON for IBM i source management, change control, release governance, and application promotion. (Required)
• Strong understanding of end-to-end supply chain processes, including purchasing, inventory management, replenishment, allocation, distribution, and fulfillment. (Required)
• Proven ability to lead high-priority production incident resolution, root-cause analysis, corrective action, and long-term risk mitigation. (Required)
• Demonstrated ability to translate technical constraints and business needs into clear priorities, practical delivery plans, and well-supported investment decisions. (Required)
• Working knowledge of SQL, EDI, APIs, file-based interfaces, and enterprise integration patterns. (Required)
• Experience identifying, validating, and documenting business rules embedded within legacy source code. (Required)

Additional Information

Taking Care of our People!

We understand the importance of financial health and security, and because of that, we provide competitive compensation to all Associates. We also offer a comprehensive benefits package including health and dental insurance, 401k retirement savings with company match, flex spending account, paid personal time off, paid company holidays, parental leave, employee eyewear discount and much, much more. At National Vision, we strive to deliver opportunities for professional growth and long-term career fulfillment. We provide training programs, access to educational courses and pride ourselves on the ever-increasing amount of promotions from within.

We are an equal opportunity employer.  We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, genetic information, disability, veteran status, and other legally protected characteristics.