Assistant Vice President of Industrial Engineering, Store Operations

TJX Companies

At TJX Companies, every day brings new opportunities for growth, exploration, and achievement. You’ll be part of our vibrant team that embraces diversity, fosters collaboration, and prioritizes your development. Whether you’re working in our four global Home Offices, Distribution Centers or Retail Stores—TJ Maxx, Marshalls, Homegoods, Homesense, Sierra, Winners, and TK Maxx, you’ll find abundant opportunities to learn, thrive, and make an impact. Come join our TJX family—a Fortune 100 company and the world’s leading off-price retailer.

Job Description:

Job Summary:

Leads the engineering function responsible for designing the flow of labor and product through stores. Owns labor standards, capacity modeling, productivity engineering, and the design and specification of physical plant and material handling systems across the fleet. Establishes the labor standards foundation to support store labor budgets, scheduling, workload planning, and store design decisions, and partners across global Operations, Finance, Supply Chain, Construction, and Store Design to translate engineering rigor into measurable productivity and customer experience improvements.

Major Areas of Responsibility

• Own the development, maintenance, and governance of labor standards across all in-store work activities (receiving, replenishment, stocking, checkout, customer service, returns, freight flow, recovery, cleaning, and back-of-house tasks).
• Apply established work measurement methodologies, time study, work sampling, and regression-based modeling to build defensible, reproducible standards.
• Establish a standards governance process: documentation, version control, change management, periodic re-engineering, and audit cadence.
• Partner with Workforce Management to ensure standards flow correctly into labor forecasting, scheduling, and store labor budgets.
• Build the methodology to translate volume drivers (units, cartons, transactions, basket, square footage, customer traffic) into accurate workload forecasts at the store and task level.
• Develop and maintain store capacity models that quantify throughput thresholds across receiving, backroom, sales floor, and front-end operations.
• Identify productivity opportunities through process analysis, time-on-task studies, and benchmarking across formats and volume tiers.
• Lead productivity improvement initiatives: process redesign, task elimination, sequence optimization, and travel-path reduction.
• Build the business cases for productivity investments and measure realized savings post-implementation with engineering rigor (not just finance attribution).
• Serve as the engineering voice in store prototype design, remodels, and new format development. Influence layout, adjacencies, fixture placement, and back-of-house configuration based on workflow and throughput analysis.
• Partner with Store Design, Construction, and Real Estate to ensure new and remodeled stores are engineered for operational efficiency, not just merchandising aesthetics.
• Develop backroom layouts, receiving configurations, and staging area designs that work across formats and volumes.
• Consult on workstation ergonomics, sightlines, and task design to reduce fatigue, injury risk, and wasted motion.
• Review and approve engineering specifications for new stores and major remodels prior to construction commitment.
• Own the strategy, specification, and lifecycle planning for in-store material handling equipment: pallet jacks, powered equipment, conveyors, lifts, carts, totes, ladders, and emerging automation.
• Evaluate, pilot, and recommend new MHE and store automation technologies; build ROI models and partner with Procurement on vendor selection and total cost of ownership.
• Establish equipment standards by store format and volume tier; manage the equipment standards catalog.
• Partner with Safety, Loss Protection, and Facilities on equipment safety standards, training requirements, preventive maintenance, and replacement cycles.
• Partner for engineering review of any in-store technology or process change to understand expense & capital requirements
• Partner with Finance to ensure labor models, capacity assumptions, and productivity targets are reflected accurately in the annual operating plan and store P&Ls.
• Partner with Supply Chain on freight flow, case pack, palletization, and inbound scheduling — to understand how supply chain & shipping decisions impact store labor.
• Partner with Field Leadership and selected pilot stores to test, validate, and refine standards and process changes before chain rollout.
• Translate engineering work into clear narratives for executive audiences who do not have an IE background.
• Establish the IE function's operating model: project intake, prioritization, methodology standards, and deliverable quality.
• Develop talent in a discipline where retail-experienced IEs are scarce; build pipelines from manufacturing, distribution, and consulting backgrounds.

Who We are Looking For: You

Must Haves

• Minimum 6 years in an engineering leadership capacity
• 10+years industrial engineering experience +/or distribution environment; notable experiences with Distribution Engineering, Process, Design or Systems Development.
• Bachelor’s Degree in Industrial Engineering or related field.
• Deep knowledge of industrial engineering, preferably in a retail environment
• Knowledge of IT systems utilized in time and motion studies
• Excellent presentation, interpersonal and project management skills
• Knowledge of needs analysis process, design, implementation and evaluation
• techniques Knowledge/Experience in QC and Six Sigma
• Proficient in Microsoft Office, including MS Project and databases

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