Principal Software Architect

Job ID: 3370

Description

Are you tired of the monotony of working on the same products every day and frustrated with the ramifications of poor architectural decisions made years ago? Do you dream of designing products based only on the best technology without making compromises for cost or business reasons? Join us and be empowered to make architectural decisions based on technical merit for a diverse portfolio of products that leverage cutting-edge cloud technologies.

Trilogy has a growing portfolio of hundreds of software products. We value simplicity and the highest technical quality for every product we build, reengineer or change. At Trilogy, you will join a team revolutionizing work in a fully remote, globally distributed organization full of top talent.

As a senior technical decision-maker, you’ll receive a new architecture challenge each week and make important architectural decisions every day. You will use and grow your expertise to design products for maximum performance, efficiency, and scale.

Apply now to see if you have what it takes to get back to doing the technical work you love while learning constantly and making profound decisions for products that reach millions of customers.

What you will be doing

Tackle design problems and write technical specs to create products for distinct tech stacks and business domains.
Uncover the “high-order bit” decisions by interviewing technical leads and analyzing data structures and code/design documents.
Make important design decisions that specify how to re-architect products in a cloud-first way on systems such as AWS and GCP.

What you will NOT be doing

You will not be managing projects or employees.
You will not participate in daily scrum meetings, make low-level decisions, perform code reviews or debug code.
You will not be talking to customers or developing a backlog of wishlist features.

Key Responsibilities

Write teardown, rebuild, and new product specs that make important decisions to simplify architecture and define a product and its features for the next 3 to 5 years.

Candidate Requirements

2+ years of experience writing production-quality code.
7+ years of experience making important architecture and design decisions on software projects, such as the application of architecture design patterns or significant open source technologies.
2+ years of experience as the decision-maker for design decisions involving the use of cloud computing services.
Experience working as a senior technical leader whose technical design decisions measurably influenced a software development organization of at least 50 people.
Ability to simplify complex ideas and communicate them in writing with clear and logical thinking.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Who is successful in this role?

Our most successful team members are super-technical and great at connecting the core of the software's design decisions to the product. They focus on data structures & algorithms. They write their thinking down so others can understand it. They are fast learners and great writers and know the difference between controlling what is truly important versus micro-managing engineering (which we do not want to do). If this describes you, you will be successful.

How many products does each role manage? What is the typical size of each product team?

We do not limit the number of products that CTOs work on in that way. They generally work on one product at a time, and once finished solving that problem/design, they move onto another product. They may come back to a product, too. We want CTOs to have continuous learning. By doing this, they learn many new technologies, design patterns and architectures, industries, and business models. We have designed our organization and processes so that this works.

How do you measure success in this role?

This is a long answer, but the basic idea is that we define actual deliverables for TPMs of all levels. These weekly deliverables are quite structured, and we check the quality of the content within those specs. For example, we evaluate how "Important" the content is, how correct the "Technical" content is, and how clear and justified the rationale for the "Decision" is. We call those ITDs, and TPMs get feedback on the quality of their work. So, by measuring the Quality and the Quantity of work, we measure success. In the longer term, we also measure how well those decisions played out in the real world.

Do you use a common tech stack across the portfolio of products?

It has been our experience that sound technical decision-making is timeless, but the details of the technical stack change over time. We make decisions around a standard tech stack at any given point in time, so that we can enjoy economies of scale. For example, our default stack for most decisions is the broad AWS service catalog, but we can (and do) override that default when it makes sense. Your Hiring Manager (a part of the interview process) can give you better specifics regarding project examples.

What you will learn

We believe in continuous growth and strive for constant improvement. As part of our team, you will learn new technologies, products, and industries daily, and our comprehensive suite of playbooks will equip you with the foundation to develop and enhance your existing expertise.

We also provide a unique CTO Remote Camp for all new hires. This full-time, fully-paid training program covers all of the unique aspects of our Cloud Architecture and Design approach. You will get daily feedback to accelerate learning and growth far beyond typical classrooms or training programs throughout your training. Our curriculum includes several bite-sized training videos explaining how we design great software. Here’s an example of how to make and validate Important Technical Decisions.

Work examples

How do you enhance an application that is expensive to maintain? We believe that before adding features to a product, it is vital to ensure that it has a simple and strong core. When we acquire a product, we challenge ourselves to rebuild it entirely using today's cloud services and patterns in under 5,000 lines of code. This challenge helps us quickly get to the core and identify all the gems that can't be replaced with off-the-shelf software and services.

Our approach begins with writing the spec to build the existing product as-is. This "Technical Teardown Spec" aims to document what is core and why all the important technical decisions were made. Sometimes, historical decisions are made for great reasons that still hold true today. Often, we'd do things differently. While we write the teardown spec, we inject our opinions and insights alongside the facts we've learned.

Once the technical teardown is complete, we write the rebuild spec that describes the important decisions necessary to rebuild the product in 5,000 lines of code.

These are examples of specs our organization has produced for Sococo:

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