Principal Software Architect

Job ID: 3686

Description

Are you the best software architect in your company? Can you identify patterns in complex systems and see ways to make them 10x simpler? Do you hate that you're losing your technical edge because of increasing managerial responsibilities? If so, join us and you will create, rebuild, and rearchitect a virtually endless supply of software products.

In this role, you will join a passionate and experienced team responsible for all of the important technical decisions on every product in our extensive portfolio of enterprise software solutions. You’ll spend your time making strategic technical design decisions, such as:

What are the core data structures used by the app? Why were they chosen? How are they mapped or applied to the domain of the problem? What were the tradeoffs or alternatives?
What is the rationale behind critical technical dependencies or limitations this product has? Are there new and creative ways to overcome them?
Can the product be broken down logically into smaller, more manageable components?

What you will be doing

Each week you will have a different design problem to work on and technical specs to create. You will work on a wide variety of products with distinct tech stacks and business domains, providing continuous learning opportunities.

Analyzing data structures, code, and design documents
Making important design decisions that specify how to re-architect products in a cloud-first way on platforms like AWS and GCP
Developing successful long-term technical strategies for complex products or larger product lines
Implementing small prototypes that help you learn and strengthen your decisions

What you will NOT be doing

Making technical decisions based primarily on saving money. You will design the best solution for the problem in the simplest way possible with maximum leverage of existing assets.
Participating in daily scrum meetings or providing day-to-day direction to an engineering team
Performing code reviews, debugging, or investigating bugs and outages

Key Responsibilities

Make clear, simple, and technically superior design decisions
Apply an exceptionally high-quality bar to the core technical design decisions - data structures, algorithms, architectural patterns, and the leverage of third-party implementations
Utilize other architects as force-multipliers, mentoring them by providing high-quality feedback on their work
Synthesize your decisions and designs into clear and structured written specs

Candidate Requirements

At least 2 years of experience writing production-quality code
At least 15 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
At least 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 150 people
Ability to simplify complex ideas and communicate them in writing with clear, logical thinking

Nice to have

A university degree that includes the study of data structures and algorithms
Experience redesigning existing products on top of serverless cloud services

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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 how those decisions allow the product to do the "important thing" in the best way possible. 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'll be successful!

How would you describe a day of work as a CTO at Crossover?

If I had to describe it succinctly, I would say that the main thing a CTO does each day is to focus on a "thing" that needs a solution. It may be a data structure or an algorithm for a brand new product. It may be how to change an existing codebase to adopt some new technology component that will make the product much better, or retire a bunch of low-value code, or a variety of other problems we are trying to solve. CTOs write down their thinking/logic in the most succinct and clear way possible. They work with other people (global/remote) to ask questions in order to get peer-feedback, and feedback from their manager.

How does the Cloud Architecture and Design organization fit within the rest of the organization?

Our approach to Cloud Architecture is heavily technical, and that is because of our belief that the most important thing is mapping the customer problems to a 10x better engineering solution to that problem. We try to simplify and make the core of the product 10x better instead of chasing every little feature that competitors do or developing piles of minor features from the backlog. That said, we also send the core messages to marketing and sales so that they can do their job. Those core messages start with the CTO team.

How many people will be directly reporting to me as a SVP/EVP of TPM?

If you join our technical product management team, you can look forward to being part of a flat organization and meaningful process that enables you to focus on delivering customer value and not managing people. As SVPs and EVPs of TPM, you will leverage VPs and TPMs to help you solve problems by generating specific work assignments with clear goals and expectations attached to them. We do have managers that spend 100% of their time overseeing the process and people. If your passion is managing people and not making the important technical product decisions, we'd love you to apply to our Software Engineering Manager, VP, SVP or EVP of Engineering roles.

What are some of the companies that you provide technical product management for?

One of the most exciting things about our group is the frequency at which some of our customers acquire new businesses. Nearly every week, we have a new acquisition to dive into and one of the first things we do is consider how we'd simplify it. As the landscape of cloud services evolves at a rapid pace, we are looking for opportunities to remove code and replace proprietary functions with commodity services, ultimately freeing us to focus on what is truly differentiated in each product.

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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