EDIT 1/5: We’re still hiring for Salt Lake City or Phoenix. I can probably sell a strong remote candidate in the U.S., but I can’t get away with remote folks in Europe (sorry).
We’re (Extend Health, part of Willis Towers Watson) doing a little bit of reorganization with our software architecture team and how it fits within the company. As part of that, we’re looking to grow the team with open slots in our main Salt Lake City office and our new Phoenix office. We might be able to add more remote folks later (I’m in Austin, and another member is in Las Vegas), but right now we’re looking for someone to be local.
Who we’re looking for
Let me say upfront that I have a very conflicted relationship with the term “software architect.” I’ve been a member of the dreaded, centralized architect team where we mostly just got in the way and I’ve had to work around plenty of architecture team’s “advice.” This time around, I want our new architecture team to be consistently considered to be an asset to our development teams while taking care of the strategic technical goals within our enterprise architecture.
More than anything, the architecture team needs to be the kind of folks that our development teams want to work with and can depend on for useful advice and help. We’re not going to be landing huge upfront specifications and there won’t be much UML-spewing going on. You will definitely be hands on inside the code and it’s likely you’ll get to work on OSS projects as part of your role (check out my GitHub profile to get an idea of the kinds of work we’ve done over the years).
You’re going to need to have deep software development experience and been in roles of responsibility on software teams before. You’re going to need to have strong communication skills because one of your primary duties is to help and mentor other developers. A good candidate should be thoughtful, always on the lookout for better approaches or technologies, and able to take on all new technical challenges. It’s not absolutely required, but a healthy GitHub or other OSS profile would be a big plus. The point there is just to look for folks that actually enjoy software development.
You’ll notice that I’m not writing up a huge bullet list of required technical acronyms. I’m more worried about the breadth and depth of your experience than an exact fit with whatever tools we happen to be using at the moment. That being said, we’re mostly using .Net on the server side (but with a heavy bias toward OSS tools) and various Javascript tools in the clients with a strong preference for React.js/Redux in newer development. We do a lot of web development, quite a bit of distributed messaging work, and some desktop tools used internally. Along the way you’ll see systems that use document databases, event sourcing, CQRS, and reactive programming. I can safely promise you that our development challenges are considerably more interesting than the average .Net shop.
The Shade Tree Developer 