Vice President, Digital Experience & Optimization

About the Role

The Vice President, Digital Experience & Optimization leads the end-to-end digital storefront, owning how the brand comes to life online and how customers experience, navigate, and shop the site.

This role is accountable for site experience, UX/UI, merchandising, conversion rate optimization and digital operations, ensuring the ecommerce platform delivers a seamless, intuitive, and high-performing customer journey that drives conversion, engagement, and loyalty.

Reporting to the Chief Ecommerce Officer, this leader translates ecommerce strategy into execution-owning how the site performs day-to-day and how it evolves over time to meet customer expectations and business goals. The ideal candidate combines consumer empathy, strong UX/UI judgment, commercial instinct, and analytical rigor-using data to identify opportunities, prioritize effectively, and drive measurable improvements across the customer journey.

You'll Make a Difference By

Consumer Experience & UX/UI
Owning the end-to-end digital customer experience, with a strong emphasis on mobile-first design and performance
Defining and driving the UX/UI vision and roadmap, ensuring an intuitive, engaging, and frictionless journey from discovery through checkout
Using behavioral data and customer insights to identifying friction points and prioritizing improvements
Translating insights into clear hypotheses and test plans, ensuring decisions are validated through measurable impact
Partnering with Brand and Creative to bringing product storytelling and seasonal narratives to life on-site
Ecommerce Performance & Conversion Rate Optimization

Owning site performance metrics (conversion, AOV, engagement, funnel progression) and contributing directly to overall ecommerce revenue performance
Leading the company's CRO function, setting the vision for experimentation and optimization, building a data-driven testing culture, and ensuring insights from A/B testing and behavioral analytics consistently translating into measurable lifts in conversion and revenue
Leading the site trading cadence (daily/weekly), identifying trends, risks, and opportunities and driving timely action
Translating ecommerce, merchandising, and marketing strategies into high-impact on-site execution
Partnering with Merchandising and Planning to optimizing product visibility, sell-through, and full-price realization
Site Operations & Merchandising

Owning day-to-day site operations, including content publishing, promotional execution, QA, and incident response
Establishing and enforcing operational standards and SLAs to ensuring consistent, high-quality execution
Leading the site merchandising strategy, including navigation, search, category pages, and product detail pages
Owning the digital product catalog, ensuring accuracy, completeness, and speed to market in a high-SKU environment
Overseeing content management systems and the team operating them, establishing processes, governance, and tooling enabling frequent, efficient site updates while developing foundational strategy and infrastructure supporting personalization as a growing capability
Personalization & Analytics

Leveraging site analytics and customer behavior data to diagnosing performance and uncovering growth opportunities
Defining and monitoring core funnel metrics and translating insights into action across UX, merchandising, and personalization
Leading a practical personalization strategy, including recommendations, search optimization, and segmentation
Building a test-and-learn culture, ensuring decisions are hypothesis-driven and measured
Leadership & Cross-Functional Partnership

Leading, coaching, and developing a high-performing team across UX/UI, Site Ops, Merchandising, and Personalization
Building a culture of accountability, speed, and continuous improvement
Partnering closely with Technology, Product, and Marketing to aligning priorities and executing effectively
Serving as a key member of the ecommerce leadership team, partnering with the Chief Ecommerce Officer on planning and performance tracking
Assisting with other responsibilities based on business needs.
About You

12+ years of ecommerce leadership experience, with ownership of site experience, UX/UI, and digital operations
Experience operating at scale within an ecommerce business, preferably in apparel, footwear, or consumer retail
Proven ability to improve conversion, engagement, and customer experience through data-driven decision making
Strong analytical capability; able to translate complex data into clear actions and business impact
Deep expertise in UX/UI, customer journey optimization, and mobile-first ecommerce design
Strong commercial acumen and experience managing in-season ecommerce performance
Experience leading cross-functional initiatives across Marketing, Technology, and Product
Demonstrated success building and leading multi-disciplinary teams
Experience in an omni-channel environment (DTC + retail/wholesale) preferred
Background with premium or lifestyle brands preferred
Experience leading major site redesigns, replatforming, or personalization initiatives preferred
About Ariat

Ariat is an innovative, outdoor global brand with roots in equestrian performance. We develop high-quality footwear and apparel for people who ride, work, and play outdoors, and care about performance, quality, comfort, and style.

The salary range for this position is $270,000 - $290,000 per year.

The salary is determined by the education, experience, knowledge, skills, and abilities of the applicant, internal equity, and alignment with market data for geographic locations. Ariat in good faith believes that this posted compensation range is accurate for this role at this location at the time of this posting. This range may be modified in the future.

Ariat's holistic benefits package for full-time team members includes (but is not limited to):

Medical, dental, vision, and life insurance options
Expanded wellness and mental health benefits
Paid time off (PTO), paid holidays, and paid volunteer days
401(k) with company match
Bonus incentive plans
Team member discount on Ariat merchandise

Note: Availability of benefits may be subject to location & employment type and may have certain eligibility requirements. Ariat reserves the right to alter these benefits in whole or in part at any time without advance notice.

Ariat will consider qualified applicants, including those with criminal histories, in a manner consistent with state and local laws. Ariat is an Equal Opportunity Employer and considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, orientation, national origin, age, disability, genetics or any other basis protected under federal, state, or local law. Ariat is committed to providing reasonable accommodations to candidates with disabilities. If you need an accommodation during the application process, email human.resources@ariat.com.

Please see our Employment Candidate Privacy Policy at www.ariat.com/careers to learn more about how we collect, use, retain and disclose Personal Information.

Please note that Ariat does not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or employment agencies. In the absence of a signed Agreement, Ariat will not consider or agree to payment of any referral compensation or recruiter/agency placement fee. In the event a recruiter or agency submits a resume or candidate without a previously signed Agreement, Ariat explicitly reserves the right to pursue and hire those candidate(s) without any financial obligation to the recruiter or agency. Any unsolicited resumes, including those submitted directly to hiring managers, are deemed to be the property of Ariat.