We live in a moment of remarkable change and opportunity that is cognitive computing. The convergence of data and technology is transforming industries, society and even the workplace. CognitiveScale is a high-energy, high-growth company funded by entities such as IBM, Intel, Microsoft and Norwest. We are seeking an enterprising individual to join our growing team as a Chief Software Architect.

As Chief Architect, you will be responsible for the architecture of CognitiveScale’s Cortex which forms the basis for our cognitive solution development. You will work closely with our CTO to capture the vision of the product capabilities, general direction on the technologies and approaches to realizing the product capabilities. You will also own the “system of record” for the architecture and advise the development team on the alignment of product and solution implementation conforming to the architecture. In addition to directing the work of the developers, you will evangelize the capabilities of the product to customers / prospects and enable sales engineers as appropriate.

You must have technical “chops” to question the CTO and team decisions / approaches objectively, understand the critical issues and resolve them to meet the product goals. You will be expected to initiate conversations, ask hard questions, and bring strategic decisions to the CognitiveScale Technical Leadership to debate and decide.

Our culture is something we cherish; we entrust our engineers with a high degree of freedom and autonomy, which fosters innovation and productivity. It’s important that our Chief Architect is an inspiration, a gentle shepherd and a reliable sparring partner, rather than a sheriff.

This position directly reports to the VP of Engineering with ‘dotted-line’ reporting to the CTO.

Requirements

• A bachelor’s degree in computer science or engineering. Advanced degree preferred
• 10+ years experience building enterprise level software solutions using a variety of software stacks / technologies including and not limited to Docker, Rancher, Scala, Java, JavaScript, Python, Kafka, MongoDB and Cassandra.
• 3+ years (most recently) doing application design and proven track record of documenting large-scale software product architecture and communicating with 10+ engineers guiding / directing them.
• 1+ years experience using at least one front end Javascript framework (AngularJS, ReactJS, etc…) and backend technologies such as Kafka, Hadoop, Spark.
• Experience with a stream processing or pub/sub architecture.
• Experience in leveraging Machine Learning / AI and NLP components in a solution.
• Experience with architecture and technology governance
• SaaS architectural expertise - especially at massive scale in a multi-tenant environment
• Expert (but perhaps rusty) coding skills
• Able to collaborate on long-term architectural vision, and articulate and evangelize that vision in and out of the company

Responsibilities

• Act as a mentor, leader, and manager for the software engineers on their team, working to turn software engineers into tech leads and tech leads into architects.
• Builds a tight relationship with CTO and Product Manager while acting as the technical owner of CognitiveScale’s Cortex product.
• Ownership of setting up frameworks to codify best practices, reducing lines of code through re-use, and ensuring team members adhere to those best practices during the design and development phases.
• During design and code reviews you understand the user story and the problem it is trying to solve. Make sure the solution uses the correct components and frameworks while enforcing best practices and lessons learned from past mistakes.
• Architecting server-based , cloud-based, SaaS AI / Data Science solutions as individual contributor
• Set up and chair Architecture Review Board and associated review and governance processes
• Supporting the development managers as well as development tools and processes to ensure alignment of product technologies and development infrastructure.
• Management of SW related IP strategy and reviews.
• Define / Drive Architectural documentation standards