Senior Technical Architect

Summary

As a Senior Technical Architect at IOG you take ownership and are accountable for the technical strategy & direction of one or more IOG products. You are chiefly responsible for understanding the full end-to-end picture of the product from a technical perspective, designing and delivering new features, whilst communicating and educating all stakeholders to ensure that everyone is aligned and understands the implications of your decisions. While a large part of your work is coordination and communication, you also have the opportunity to craft key components such as the libraries and infrastructure that ensure the quality and coherence of the architecture.

You will provide technical leadership and oversight to the development teams, delegating architecture tasks effectively in order to avoid both scalability bottlenecks and architectural disagreements. You will ensure choices to use new languages or new libraries include training and usage standards for the project. You must also be pragmatic about technical debt, and be willing to make difficult decisions or compromises in the architecture in order to deliver great products within a competitive timeframe.

Duties

• Teamwork and Methodologies
• Support agile software development practices
• Participate in planning, definition, and high-level design of the solution and explore solution alternatives
• Participate and give technical advice in decisions related to work prioritization
• Participate in iteration plannings to decide how much of the highest priority work is reasonable to select for execution in a given iteration
• Review acceptance criteria of critical task assigned to developers
• Communicate technical details with scientists, researchers and developers.
• Summarize technical details about proposed solutions to management and business decision makers.
• Contribute to the work breakdown and allocation decisions to get the best out of team members.
• Software Architecture
• Ensure that recommended software engineering principles are followed
• Enable a continuous delivery of features through appropriate architecture design and establish timeline and milestones
• Distinguish features and enablers and proactively recommend work on enablers to allow the future implementation of features
• Define subsystems and their interfaces, allocating clear responsibilities to subsystems
• Establish and raise awareness of critical non-functional requirements
• Document the architecture and technical solution decisions in a common source of truth location
• Ensure that our products do not depend on unstable and immature external libraries
• Evaluate and select appropriate software or hardware and suggest integration methods
• Select appropriate solutions to problems
• Be conscious of the costs of architectural decisions and take these costs into account when jointly making important decisions
• Manage and evolve legacy solutions and integrate with legacy technology when appropriate.
• Knowledge:
• Acquire deep technical understanding of problems and solution spaces.
• Maintain a firm and updated grasp of CS and Engineering techniques.
• Review literature and learn new topics that are relevant for the problems that need to be solved.
• Know the limitations of your own knowledge and experience to know when to learn more or when to look for outside expertise.
• Leadership:
• Support and encourage the software engineers.
• Provide technical guidance to software engineers
• Recognize when training is worth the time and contribute to decisions on training.

Requirements

Key Competencies

• Set out best practice and ensure that software engineering principles are followed
• Ability to define and document technical and architectural visions for products, libraries or components
• Design technical solutions (features, libraries, components, ...) for business requirements and objectively document how well the solutions satisfy the requirements
• Break down solutions into smaller tasks with clear acceptance criteria and a short completion time. Disambiguating technical nuances
• Mentor, influence and/or lead teams of software engineers (including line management duties)

Education / Experience

• A Degree in Computer Science/Engineering (advance degree nice to have)
• A minimum of 5 years of industrial/commercial development
• Strong commercial awareness / business focus, you must know how to deliver a great product
• A minimum of 2 years demonstrated leadership leader in component or product level architecture
• Knowledge of decentralized application architectures as well as functional and object-oriented programming paradigms
• Expert knowledge of modern software engineering approaches
• Knowledge of selected programming languages (e.g. Rust, Scala, Javascript)
• Experience working together with scientists, researchers and formal methods specialists
• Practical experience with Agile software development methods
• Proven aptitude in:
• Writing both architecture specifications and executive summaries
• The ability to write clear problem statements
• Facilitating team-wide technical discussions that drive outcomes
• Managing your Time effectively to align with priorities of the product/project
• Problem-solving
• Recognizing and eliminating sources of complexity, error, instability, insecurity, and poor performance in software systems
• Teaching important concepts to the team
• Exceptional coding in a language that is relevant to the system
• Clear, assertive communication
• Making decisions

Benefits

Location

IOG is a fully distributed organization but due to team distribution, we require someone to be based either in Ireland, the UK or Poland.

All colleagues

• Flexible schedule
• Remote work
• Laptop reimbursement
• New starter package to buy hardware essentials (headphones, monitor, etc)
• Learning & Development opportunities
• Competitive PTO and Sick Leave plan

UK & Ireland Employees

• Monthly Health Stipend to use towards any wellness or medical coverage/service
• Pension

At IOG, we value diversity and always treat all employees and job applicants based on merit, qualifications, competence, and talent. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.