Chief Software Architect
Acquia, is transforming the digital strategies of companies all over the world with our open cloud platform. We are passionate and relentlessly committed to helping our clients create digital experiences that are more relevant, personalized, and built for a fast-changing, always-connected, mobile-first world. Headquartered in the US, we have been named as one of North America’s fastest growing software companies as reported by Deloitte and Inc. Magazine, and have been rated a leader by the analyst community and named one of the Best Places to Work by the Boston Business Journal. We are Acquia. We are building for the future of the web, and we want you to be a part of it.
The Chief Software Architect is a leading member of our technology team and ensures that the company’s software products are well engineered, operable, maintainable, aligned with the strategy and vision and provide the anticipated business value. The CSA actively collaborates with the SVP of Engineering, CPO, CTO, leadership team, customer support, engineering, operations, product managers, customers, prospects, strategic partners and investors to achieve these goals.
Responsibilities:
- Managing a team of software architects to respond to business challenges and design solutions for the future.
- Interfacing with and influencing internal stakeholders, including the CPO and CTO, engineering leads, product managers, and executives that care, on emerging technology use and ideas.
- Diagramming and documenting current and future architectural plans sufficiently that necessary stakeholders can understand how Acquia's technology works.
- When appropriate, focusing deeply on bootstrapping the architecture for an individual new product or initiative, until a team is in place to take it over.
- Balancing the sometimes-opposing goals of engineering velocity and time-to-market versus architectural elegance, future extensibility, and designing for code reuse when devising technical strategy.
- Driving deployment of new features or systems and the retirement of old ones, overcoming inertial resistance to change from customers and employees, in order to simplify product development and operations and increase velocity.
- Contributing non-trivial code to multiple projects so as to remain relevant and credible as a software engineer.
- Mentoring developers on the various product teams.
- Writing blogs, white papers, and thought leadership materials for internal/external publication.
- Occasionally presenting to key enterprise customers, partners and gets involved in sales opportunities.
- Has a complete understanding of the platform and how different parts interact with each other at high level.
- Collaborating with vendors and influences their roadmap to match with Acquia’s long term plans.
The ideal candidate is ...
- able to lead experienced and battle-tested engineers by influence and not authority
- biased towards practical solutions
- a voracious learner who provides guidance through questions as opposed to statements
- inclined to document and diagram ideas as a primary method of communication
- able to communicate complex, technical concepts to a wide range of stakeholders with varying perspectives and technical expertise
- thrives under pressure and taking on big challenges
- a visionary who inspires a team to achieve great results
Qualifications:
- 10+ years of experience in progressively challenging hands on engineering and then architecture roles.
- Experience with design and implementation of Platform as a Service (PaaS) capabilities including virtual networks, virtual machines, cloud services, container services, data center OS services, web sites, data services, etc.
- Experience in building scaled out complex systems (thousands of servers) on private/public clouds.
- Experience with automated testing methodologies and frameworks.
- Experience with AWS and related services.
- Experience in building scaled-out infrastructure on private and public clouds such as AWS, Google, or Azure.
- Solid understanding of the practical application of agile development methods and leading software development teams in an Agile/Scrum environment.
Acquia is an equal opportunity (EEO) employer. We hire without regard to age, color, disability, gender (including gender identity), marital status, national origin, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law.