Retail Ops Engineer
noun. The person who engineers the purchase-order-to-shelf flow instead of reacting to it. Systems over spreadsheets; evidence over guesswork.
Jordan Harper
Co-founder & CEO, EasyOps · July 2026 · 4 min read
Every CPG brand already employs this person. Today the title is operations manager, logistics coordinator, or supply chain associate, and the day is spent reacting: chasing status across email and portals, reconstructing what happened to an order, discovering deductions after the money is gone.
The work is not the problem. The work is load-bearing: it determines whether a brand makes money on the orders it has already won. The problem is that it is practiced as firefighting when it should be practiced as engineering: building systems that move orders forward on their own, adding checks that catch violations before they cost anything, and maintaining an audit trail that makes every dollar defensible.
That discipline deserves a name.
We call it retail ops engineering.
- Reconstructs the history of a single PO across three inboxes and a chat thread
- Moves between the distributor portal, the 3PL portal, and the carrier site to answer one question
- Learns about deductions after the remittance is already short
- Fields the same status questions dozens of times a week
- Works from a prioritized worklist: only the POs that require human judgment
- Builds checks that catch violations before anything ships
- Disputes with evidence: the rule version, the carrier scan, the signed POD
- Answers any question about any PO in seconds, for the entire team
The job description
Hiring for this role? Start here.
Retail Ops Engineer
Operations · Full-time · Reports to COO / Head of Operations
You will own how our purchase orders flow from confirmation to payment, and turn that flow into a system. The mandate: replace manual chasing with reliable infrastructure.
Responsibilities
- Own the purchase-order lifecycle from confirmation to payment across all distributors
- Engineer automated compliance checks against distributor routing guides and fee schedules
- Maintain the audit trail: every rule version, document, and decision traceable
- Recover margin: match every deduction to its PO and rule, and dispute what does not hold
- Eliminate redundant work: any task performed twice the same way becomes a candidate for automation
Tools of the trade: EasyOps · The Intelligent PO™
Use it as written or adapt it to your team; the role matters more than the attribution.