Merchandise Data-Observability Recovery Leader — Grocery Commerce

The mandate

The data-reliability head was asked to leave after an apparently successful category migration sent stale assortment and pack-size relationships into replenishment and digital availability. Stores caught some anomalies manually, but promotions, substitutions and supplier orders were affected across three regions before dashboards recognised a freshness issue. The business has frozen further migrations ten weeks before its most important seasonal trading period.

The interim must be in Mexico City within ten days for a fixed seven-month assignment, carrying executive authority through recovery, seasonal readiness and controlled restart. Recruitment for a permanent chief data reliability officer begins immediately. The incoming leader is expected during month six for a four-week overlap; no extension will be offered for avoidable backlog or an incomplete operating model.

Handover requires decision-level monitoring across assortment, price, promotion, inventory and replenishment journeys; every severe anomaly must resolve to affected stores, products, orders and accountable response. Two peak rehearsals and eight consecutive weekly changes must meet detection and recovery targets. The successor will decide an unseen release from evidence and sign ownership of remaining source and semantic debt.

The interim may stop data releases, quarantine domains, mandate consumer impact telemetry, direct the authorised MX$260 million recovery and appoint temporary incident or quality leads. Changes to retail price, supplier commercial terms, permanent appointments, customer compensation or spend above budget require accountable business executives. The seat cannot override food-safety controls or use observed employee corrections for individual performance management.

Merchandising strategy, replacement of point-of-sale systems and historical cleansing without a current decision consequence are outside this assignment. The authority may demand traceability at those boundaries but does not own category selection, warehouse redesign or a company-wide analytics reorganisation. Work must prioritise the few data failures capable of creating large store, customer or working-capital effects.

Why this seat is open

The incident exposed monitoring designed around pipelines rather than the merchandise decisions they feed, and leadership accountability failed with it. Engineering and category teams cannot neutrally arbitrate whose control should have detected the corruption. A temporary executive is needed immediately to restore safe trading and leave the permanent leader a measured operating system before migrations resume.

What you will own

• Reconstruct the migration defect through source changes, transformations, semantic relationships, publication, consuming decisions and store or customer outcomes.
• Establish critical merchandise journeys and map their freshness, volume, distribution, relationship and reconciliation controls to explicit business consequences.
• Decide release readiness using consumer-impact evidence, rollback capability, correction effort and seasonal risk rather than pipeline success alone.
• Build anomaly blast-radius views identifying affected products, locations, suppliers, orders, promotions and customer promises within operational response windows.
• Direct peak exercises covering stale master data, partial store feeds, supplier-code change, regional lag and inconsistent digital-versus-store availability.
• Assign enduring ownership for source semantics, transformations, observability controls, business reconciliation and incident decisions across technology and merchandising.
• Induct the successor through release councils, store observation, an unseen defect simulation and signed transfer of residual semantic and control debt.

Candidate qualifications

• Held executive data reliability, retail platform or merchandise systems authority in a multi-region grocery, retail or consumer-commerce organisation.
• Recovered a data failure that affected physical operations or customers despite apparently healthy orchestration and infrastructure measures.
• Designed observability around business relationships and decision consequences, including freshness, semantic drift, referential integrity and blast radius.
• Governed high-risk release freezes and safe restart during a peak retail calendar with direct exposure to merchandising and store executives.
• Resolved ownership among source applications, data engineers and business consumers without assigning every failure to a central platform team.
• Transferred a recovered reliability function to permanent leadership using live decisions and unseen simulations rather than document-only handover.

Non-negotiables

• Available within ten days for an exclusive Mexico City assignment and fluent enough in Spanish to lead store and supplier-impact reviews directly.
• Has carried operational authority for product, price, inventory or replenishment data at material physical-retail scale.
• No undisclosed relationship with observability, integration, master-data or systems-integration vendors likely to benefit from remediation.
• Will keep migration frozen until decision-level evidence supports restart, even where delay creates visible seasonal commercial pressure.

1. 49 words maximum. State your earliest Mexico City start and one retail data failure whose customer or store blast radius you established.
2. 49 words maximum. Which relationship checks would catch a valid product record paired with a stale pack size or assortment?
3. 49 words maximum. Describe evidence you used to lift a peak-season data release freeze safely.