Lead Architect

Top Five Skills

Connects with the Mission

Wider Circle’s mission should be a significant factor in this person’s desire to consider the position. The right candidate will be a values-driven individual who immediately aligns with Wider Circle’s values, connects and compliments teammates, and demonstrates the appropriate passion within their own personal life.

Flexibility

Wider Circle is known for their consistency, passion, and flexibility to respond to member and customer needs. Candidates should prefer the types of processes, team dynamics, and velocity to thrive in this type of dynamic environment to address these evolving needs.

Seasoned Lead Architect

The candidate should have 7+ years of prior experience, including software development, architecture, testing, DevOps, and engineering leadership. They should be familiar working for a company and team of similar size, at the same point in the company’s trajectory. They must be comfortable executing successfully on internal and external projects, pilots, and contracts. They should have experience building and working with a remote and geographically distributed team that includes offshore developers. They should be familiar with the end-to-end recruiting process of finding, interviewing, and training the right resources in order to grow their team to 2 or 3x. And finally, they should be effective communicators, capable of collaborating with internal and external stakeholders in both casual and formal settings.

Breadth of Technical Knowledge

In order to effectively design and build software solutions, the candidate needs a mix of back-end, front-end, and mobile development expertise, including both native mobile and responsive web. They should be fluent with platforms and languages such as Salesforce, NodeJS, React, React Native, Flutter, Amazon AWS, and Twilio. They must be familiar with JIRA, agile methodologies, and squad organizational structures, as well as branching strategies, continuous integration, and automated test frameworks. They should be capable of creating front-end and back-end architectures that are both scalable and optimized for performance. They should be experienced with APIs and third-party integrations, and synchronizing data between systems. And in addition to designing systems and directing others, they will also be expected to write their own code, perform code reviews, and manage source code repository branches. They should also be able to manage sprints and backlogs, lead software design and architecture discussions, and be the champion for internal tech debt improvements. Finally, they should have experience with Miro, Lucid, or similar tools to create and maintain architecture diagrams.

Been There, Done That Attitude

We are looking for someone who has a proven track record of transitioning tech teams and products in small/medium startups as the companies scale. They should have experience making decisions on build vs. buy, maintaining original tools vs. creating next generation solutions, and using on-shore vs. off-shore resources. The candidate should have a knack for identifying and reducing bottlenecks and manual processes in order to streamline software development, increase velocity, and deliver solutions on time or ahead of schedule. They should have the confidence to lead engineering tasks and projects with assistance and partnership from Product Management and senior leadership, but without requiring constant oversight. And finally, they should be interested in an eventual engineering management career path.

Responsibilities

• Designing and overseeing the implementation of our next-generation products
• Supporting our existing products in a maintenance mode, while gradually migrating functionality to the new products
• Research, pilot, and integrate third-party solutions into our product suite
• Leading a software development team, including internal and external staff augmentation engineers, in a remote, distributed environment
• Working with the Product and Engineering management to scope and execute items on the product roadmap, and ensure that solutions are delivered on time and on budget
• Managing the complete software development lifecycle from requirement definitions to deployment
• Working with stakeholders to understand their needs requirements, and translate them into working features and products
• Expanding the team over time through hiring and outsourced vendors
• Collaborating with developers on the system design and architecture
• Working in an agile environment, including sprint planning, standups, retrospectives, and close coordination with squad leads
• Creating architecture diagrams to convey the meaning and purpose of your designs