Working at Amer Sports: what innovation really looks like from the inside

When a company says it’s built around innovation, it usually means a slide deck and a tagline. When Amer Sports says it, they can point to the world’s first powered pants, a fully recyclable ski helmet, and a portfolio of brands that collectively posted $6.6 billion in revenue in 2025.

The group behind Arc’teryx, Salomon, Wilson, Atomic, and Peak Performance is not a holding company that manages brands at arm’s length. It’s an organisation where product breakthroughs, global operations, and commercial ambition are genuinely interconnected, and where that ambition is increasingly creating opportunities across Europe. Through their partnership with SPORTYJOB, those opportunities are now directly accessible to sports industry talent on the continent.

Here’s what you need to understand before you apply.

From tobacco conglomerate to global sports powerhouse

Amer Sports’ trajectory is one of the more unusual in the industry. The group was originally founded in Finland in 1950 as a diversified industrial conglomerate, one that, for a time, controlled a significant share of the Finnish tobacco market. The pivot to sport began in the late 1980s with the acquisition of Wilson, then Atomic in 1994, and accelerated dramatically in 2005 when the group brought in Salomon and Arc’teryx in a single move.

The result is a portfolio that covers almost every performance segment: technical mountain apparel and equipment (Arc’teryx, Atomic), trail and outdoor footwear (Salomon), racquet and ball sports (Wilson), sustainable performance wear (Peak Performance). Each brand retains its own identity and creative autonomy, but underneath that, Amer Sports provides the operational scale, technology infrastructure, and global distribution that individual brands couldn’t build alone.

In February 2024, the group listed on the New York Stock Exchange, adding another layer of accountability and visibility to a business already operating across 40 countries with over 15,000 employees.

Innovation as operating principle, not marketing angle

The post LinkedIn framed it clearly: innovation at Amer Sports is not a side project. The evidence bears that out.

Arc’teryx’s MO/GO powered pants, the first of their kind in the world, represent the kind of R&D commitment that takes years of cross-functional work between product designers, engineers, and materials scientists. Salomon’s Brigade INDEX, the first fully recyclable ski helmet, required rethinking not just the product but the entire end-of-life supply chain around it. Neither of these came from a hackathon afternoon.

The circularity work happening across the group, repair programmes, resale platforms, recyclable product design, is equally demanding, requiring collaboration between sustainability teams, legal, operations, and brand marketing simultaneously.

What this means in practice is that innovation at Amer Sports is not confined to the product lab. It lives in IT teams running complex SAP rollouts that transform how a 15,000-person organisation actually works. It lives in partnership functions building relationships with world-leading organisations and research institutions. It lives in the daily problem-solving of people across every department who are expected to bring a creative mindset to their work, not just execute against a brief.

What kinds of roles does Amer Sports recruit for?

The group’s hiring covers a wide functional spectrum, structured across its brands and at the group level. A few areas worth understanding:

Technical and product roles sit at the heart of each brand’s identity. Roles in product development, materials innovation, and R&D require deep expertise in outdoor or performance apparel, footwear, or equipment, combined with the ability to collaborate across brand and group teams.

Commercial and go-to-market roles are growing rapidly, particularly as the group accelerates its direct-to-consumer model. Arc’teryx’s owned retail stores are among the highest-performing in the industry, generating around $1,928 per square foot in 2024, and Salomon is expanding its retail footprint aggressively. Brand managers, retail leads, e-commerce specialists, and wholesale managers are all in demand.

Operations and technology roles are critical to the group’s ability to function as one coherent organisation across 40 countries. SAP specialists, supply chain analysts, finance professionals, and IT project managers all play a direct role in enabling the brands to move fast.

People, HR, and talent roles are a growing priority as the group scales. Attracting and retaining specialists across such a diverse portfolio of brands, each with its own culture and community, requires a sophisticated approach to employer branding and talent development.

Cross-brand internal mobility is a genuine feature of life at Amer Sports, not just a line in a job description. Employees can and do move between Arc’teryx, Salomon, and Wilson across functions and geographies.

What Amer Sports looks for

The group describes itself as looking for people who are passionate about sport and the outdoors, eager to take on challenges in a fast-growing industry, and oriented towards results through teamwork. Those are the expected descriptors.

What the role profile across brands actually reveals is something slightly more specific: a strong tolerance for ambiguity and change, comfort working across cultures and time zones, and the ability to contribute in an environment where structures are still being built, not just maintained.

This is a group that grew from $5.2 billion in revenue in 2024 to $6.6 billion in 2025, a 27% increase in a single year. That kind of growth rate means roles are genuinely evolving, teams are expanding, and the people who join now are helping shape what the organisation looks like at scale.

Why Amer Sports and SPORTYJOB work together

Amer Sports is not looking for generalists who ended up in sport by accident. Every brand in the portfolio, from Arc’teryx’s technical mountain community to Wilson’s court culture, has a deeply specific identity, and that identity matters to the people who work there.

SPORTYJOB was built precisely for this: a platform where the audience already lives and breathes sport, outdoor, and active lifestyle. The candidates who find Amer Sports’ open roles through SPORTYJOB are not stumbling across an interesting company. They are people for whom working at Arc’teryx, Salomon, or Wilson is not a job option, it’s the job they’ve been working towards.

For a group with the ambition and growth trajectory of Amer Sports, that targeting is not a nice-to-have. It’s the difference between a hire who gets it from day one and one who needs six months to understand why any of it matters.

Explore all open Amer Sports positions, across Arc’teryx, Salomon, Wilson, Atomic, and Peak Performance, directly on SPORTYJOB: 👉 Browse Amer Sports jobs on SPORTYJOB

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