Technical Architect - Remote

IO Global is the blockchain engineering company that created the Cardano platform. The company is now developing Atala PRISM, a digital identity and verifiable credentials product. We are building a product with a solid technical foundation that can be tailored to the needs of several business sectors. We have clients and many opportunities, and we need software professionals with solid technical foundations and experience to join a fast-paced team. You will help us design, implement and deliver.

In our teams, we start from product requirements and design, and implement a solution that we own end-to-end. We do protocols, services, applications, and even create infrastructure and deployment plans, fully automating everything in the process. We have built an architecture on top of Cardano, but we can be blockchain-agnostic as well.

The Atala team of about 20 people includes engineers, designers, and product, project and engineering leaders. We are split around the globe, spanning time zones, from Mexico to Australia.

As a Technical Architect you will be the role model for our software engineers, leading the technical path: from interfacing with clients and understanding and analyzing requirements, to designing and implementing software. You are a software engineer who exhibits leadership and organizational skills and you set a high bar for the rest of the team. Your attention to detail is exemplary and you are strong in coding.

Your mission

As a Technical Architect at IOG you take ownership and are accountable for the technical decisions concerning a product. You are responsible for designing products, components, features, and libraries that satisfy functional and non-functional requirements driven by the needs of users. To achieve this aim, you must interact with the product managers, provide feedback on the satisfiability of requirements, present solutions for satisfying requirements, and provide a critical and impartial analysis of the pros and cons of the options. You must also provide technical leadership and scrutiny of the development teams, and must delegate architecture tasks effectively and responsibly to avoid efficiency bottlenecks and architectural disagreements. You must be pragmatic about technical debt, and must be willing to make difficult compromises to deliver minimum viable products within reasonable amounts of time.

Your will be expected to:

Teamwork and methodologies:

• Support agile software development practices
• Participate in the planning, definition, and high-level design of the solution while exploring options
• Participate and give technical advice on decisions related to prioritizing work
• Participate in planning to decide how much of the highest priority work is reasonable to select for execution in a given iteration
• Review acceptance criteria of critical tasks assigned to developers
• Communicate technical details to 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 and architecture:

• Do hands-on coding, following best practices
• Ensure that recommended software engineering principles are followed
• Enable a continuous delivery of features through appropriate architecture design, and establish timelines 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 decisions
• Ensure that 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 decisions
• Manage and improve legacy solutions and integrate with legacy technology when appropriate.

Knowledge:

• Acquire deep technical understanding of problems and solutions
• Maintain a firm grasp of computer science and engineering techniques.
• Review literature and investigate topics that are relevant for the problems that need to be solved
• Understand the limitations of your own knowledge and experience to know when to learn more or when to look for outside expertise.
• Be open-minded and flexible: sometimes the best technology to use is something we do not yet know much about

Leadership

• Own your technical area
• Lead by example
• Be proactive and take initiatives to raise and address issues, and improve processes, work organization
• Provide technical guidance to software engineers
• Recognise when training is worth the time and contribute to decisions on training.

Requirements

Your expertise

• A degree in computer science or engineering. Candidates without a degree but with a proven track record of solid software engineering contributions and technical leadership are also eligible
• A minimum of two to three years of industrial/commercial development
• A minimum of one year as technical architect
• Practical experience with agile software development methods
• Experience working with Git
• Strong communication skills; technical product ownership experience will be much appreciated
• Strong experience of Scala and related technologies

Benefits

Location

IOG is a fully distributed organization and therefore this is a remote position. Due to team distribution we are ideally searching for someone in an EU timezone.

All Colleagues

• Flexible schedule
• Remote work - ability to work anywhere
• Laptop reimbursement
• New starter package to buy hardware essentials (headphones, monitor, etc)
• Udemy for Business
• Competitive PTO and Sick Leave plan

US Employees

• Medical, Dental, and Vision benefits coverage through Anthem with 100% premium cost covered by IO Global for the employee and dependents
• Health Savings Account
• Life Insurance

UK Employees

• Monthly Health Stipend to use towards any wellness or medical coverage/service
• Pension