Senior Technical Architect

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.

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