You are involved in the architecture definition of every solution, including or not a company product, crafted for and delivered to a customer. You have an exhaustive and bottom up knowledge of the company’s products architecture and are able to define clearly and efficiently how to integrate the products into the final solution you design. As per your position, you impact the product and solution architecture decision, bringing your expertise on company’s product and customer feedback.
Responsibilities
1. Products architecture
Your goal is to leverage to the maximum the product portfolio of the company. In order to achieve that goal, you pursue three different targets:
1. Acquire a thorough knowledge of the products architecture, their limitations, bugs, APIs and respective roadmaps.
2. Actively participate in the definition of the products roadmap, feeding back your experience from ongoing and past solutions you have crafted, so that the products make it easier for you to design efficient solutions.
3. Provide feedback on the products interfaces so that the organization can easily extend the products if needs be to cover specific customer requirements.
For these targets you work in close contact with the engineering team taking the pulse on bugs, performance metrics, roadmap delays, etc. You have an advisor role on how to define the more suitable architecture for the product, with all the best evolutive and global vision possible, including flexible maintenance and configurability, enforcing choices aligned with the technology guidelines defined.
You have an in-depth understanding of the security requirements and challenges faced by the products and you ensure that the solutions you will design on top of them won’t introduce vulnerabilities exposing the company and its customers to potential threats. For this you are aware on all the security features implemented in the product and their importance, working closely with the R&D department.
2. Custom solutions architecture
As a software architect you strive to design a solution that will comply with the customer’s expectations and maximize profitability for the company. As solutions are composed of a mix of products and custom software, you leverage your product knowledge and define the integration points as well as the customer specific blocks.
When the opportunity enters the sales cycle of the company you participate in the proposal elaboration bringing your creativity and expertise to the table.
Once awarded and depending on the execution model of the project you are accountable of the creation and maintenance of the necessary documents to guarantee a successful implementation either by internal resources or through outsourcing partners including, but not only: software architecture overview, integration points with the products and pointers to the relevant API documentations, data models, recommendations for design patterns, workflows, etc.
You take extra care in creating crystal clear documents written in international English and using architectural documentation frameworks such as Arc42.
As the project moves through its lifecycle you are regularly checking up on the implementation team to make sure your architecture is being implemented according to plan and make yourself available to answer any question about it in a timely manner. You also leverage this opportunity to collect challenges and limitations discovered during the implementation to feed back in the products architecture.
When faced with implementation challenges you support the engineering team by providing alternatives and potentially adapting your architecture. You are responsible of ensuring the sound quality of the final solution architecture.
3. Others
You continuously keep yourself informed about the latest technological development in the market and stay up to date on latest design patterns and best practices.
You also allocate some time to investigate solutions from the competition to discover potential advancements that could be useful to the products or the solutions you design.
Finally, you spend a small part of your time implementing some code for the solutions you’ve designed, giving a hand to the implementation team and keeping close to the battlefield to better understand the potential flaws and advantages of your own architecture.
The role is a customer facing role, where the Architect should take part in solution definition, and customer negotiation. This implies to have a high level of spoken and written English as well as the capacity to travel from time to time when required to attend high management level meetings together with the customer, partners or accompany any other executive of the company (ie. Sales).
Requirements
- +5 years of experience in similar position, preferably in a product company
- In-depth knowledge of the software development life cycle
- Passion for code quality and maintainable applications
- Experience in the majority of the following: Spring, JPA, REST-API, XML, CI, Maven, PKI, Java EE, JMeter, Cryptography practices, Oracle Mission Control.
- University degree, in Computer Sciences or related field.
Extra points for:
- Experience in building projects from scratch, including, but not limited to DB design, component design, modules separation, framework evaluation.
- Delivery of mission-critical systems.
- Experience with technologies such as NoSQL, AWS, OpenShift, Jenkins, JBehave, RAML/Swagger.
- Personal Qualities
- Great analytical skills, with an enquiring and structured mind.
- Highly accountable; takes ownership and drives sense of urgency
- Strong leadership skills, with a highly collaborative yet decisive approach
- Impeccable work ethic, humble but confident
- Driven, self-starter; comfortable working in a rapidly changing environment
- Clear, concise communicator, able to inspire and drive consensus.
- Excellent English, both spoken and written.
