Principal Materials Developer

Job Summary The Principal Materials Developer is the enterprise-level technical authority for footwear materials innovation, development, and commercialization. This role defines long-range materials strategies and standards that advance product performance, design intent, sustainability, quality, margin, and manufacturing readiness across categories and regions. Serving as a strategic bridge among global Product, Design, Innovation, Sustainability, Sourcing, and manufacturing partners, the Principal Materials Developer anticipates emerging material opportunities and risks, leads the most complex and high-impact development initiatives, and elevates materials capabilities across the organization. As a senior individual contributor, this role provides technical leadership, mentorship, and decision guidance without direct people-management responsibility. Description Essential Functions Defines enterprise materials metrics, reporting, and decision frameworks that provide leadership visibility into innovation pipelines, development readiness, cost, quality, sustainability, complexity, and supply risk across categories. Leads the research, creation, validation, and commercialization of breakthrough and high-complexity materials that balance design intent, consumer benefit, technical performance, sustainability, cost, quality, and manufacturing scalability. Sets the strategy, standards, taxonomy, and governance for global physical and digital materials libraries, ensuring accurate, accessible, decision-ready information and disciplined material adoption and retirement. Establishes multi-season materials roadmaps and directs the most strategic seasonal materials plans from early concept through commercialization, aligning innovation priorities with category, brand, and business objectives. Provides technical governance across the end-to-end materials development process, establishing readiness criteria, resolving critical exceptions, and ensuring high-risk materials achieve performance, quality, cost, timing, compliance, and manufacturing requirements before commercialization. Partners with senior Product, Design, Innovation, Sustainability, Merchandising, and Sourcing leaders to define global and category materials direction, translate future consumer and market needs into material opportunities, and influence product creation strategies. Authors and evolves material performance standards, testing protocols, development methods, and quality expectations across product categories, using technical expertise and data to raise organizational capability and reduce recurring issues. Influences and challenges cross-functional teams and senior stakeholders with evidence-based material recommendations that improve product differentiation, quality sustainability, margin, speed, and manufacturability while protecting design intent. Defines data standards and process requirements for materials within Centric PLM, champions data integrity and adoption, and partners with system and data teams to improve workflows, reporting, traceability, and global information exchange. Builds strategic partnerships with global suppliers, tanneries, mills, laboratories, and manufacturing teams to accelerate innovation, strengthen technical capability, improve supply resilience, and deliver materials that meet consumer, market, margin, and end-use requirements. Please note this job description is not designed to contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties, or responsibilities that are required of the employee for this job. Duties responsibilities and activities may change at any time with or without cause. Qualifications Bachelor's Degree in Materials Engineering, Textiles Engineering, Product Development, or related field required. Minimum ten (10) years of progressively responsible materials development experience, including leadership of complex footwear materials programs across multiple categories, season, or regions Extensive experience influenci…

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