Staff Software Architect (Dallas, TX)

This is a remote role, employees are welcome to work near any of our principal location hubs: Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Dallas and NYC.

SSENSE (pronounced [es-uhns]) is a global technology platform operating at the intersection of culture, community, and commerce. Headquartered in Montreal, it features a mix of established and emerging luxury brands across womenswear, menswear, kidswear, and Everything Else.

SSENSE has garnered critical acclaim as both an e-commerce engine and a producer of cultural content, generating an average of 100 million monthly page views. Approximately 80% of its audience is between the ages of 18 to 40. It is privately held and has achieved high double digit annual growth and profitability since its inception.

SSENSE is looking for an experienced Software Architect to join our rapidly growing technology team. As a Software Architect, you will design and influence the next generation of software solutions at SSENSE. You will design blueprints and define guidelines that will guide our development teams in building high-quality solutions. Being a member of the central architecture team, but assigned to a specific business domain, you will build deep expertise in a core competency of SSENSE (e-commerce, payment solutions, supply chain, order management, etc.) and contribute to the modernization and extension of the solutions in place. The ideal candidate has a strong technical background in AWS cloud-native software development and has successfully delivered complex, scalable, reliable and secure solutions that have stood the test of time.

RESPONSIBILITIES

Software Architecture (60%)

• Gain deep knowledge of a business domain and its related software systems. Craft the target architecture to meet the 2-3 year objectives and the phased implementation plan to achieve it.

• Participate in the implementation through proactive collaboration with the development teams by involving them in the design discussions, participating in the sprint ceremonies, conducting code reviews and technical review sessions.

• Collaborate with the Product and Business teams on the roadmap definition and business case development.

• Provide architectural designs (C4 diagrams), Proof Of Concepts, code samples and tools to support the implementation.

Architecture reviews and standard definition (20%)

• Participate in departmental architectural reviews, validate proposals and provide guidance to peer architects and developers.

• Contribute to the definition of standards across the department and evangelize them through effective communication

Continuous learning and knowledge sharing (10%)

• Develop knowledge and skills through formal training, reading and on the job experience, on subjects of software development as well as business domains of e-commerce and supply chain

• Raise the bar for software development and help others learn the craft through code reviews, design reviews, whiteboard sessions and presentations.

• Actively contribute to SSENSE University, the internal peer learning platform, in order to promote continuous learning

Recruiting and ambassadorship (10%)

• Participate in HR recruiting events, helping to identify and recruit top developers

• Conduct interviews and document the outcome

• Act as SSENSE ambassador in the developer community, representing the company in local meetups, conferences, contributing to open-source, publishing on the SSENSE tech blog, etc.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field. Master’s degree, an asset
• A minimum of 10 years of experience designing and building software applications.
• A minimum of 3 recent years of professional AWS experience is required.
• Experience in AWS cloud-native application development and devops is an asset.
• Knowledge of micro-service architecture on Kubernetes and AWS Serverless environments are an asset.
• Programming experience in Typescript/JS and Python are an asset.

SKILLS

• Highly analytical and detail-oriented
• Outstanding communication and presentation abilities
• Ability to coach and mentor junior employees
• Ability to influence and drive change
• Team player with a high sense of accountability and ownership
• Solution-oriented mindset and can-do attitude to overcome challenges
• Ability to thrive in a fast-paced environment and master frequently changing web technologies and techniques

WORLD CLASS TECHNOLOGY

Technology is at the core of everything we do at SSENSE. Driven by an engineering mindset and a problem-solving attitude, we blend fashion with technology to deliver an unparalleled experience to our customers as we build seamless, custom solutions to deliver the SSENSE offering.

WORLD CLASS TEAM
The SSENSE tech team is responsible for an international headless commerce platform. Working in an agile environment, our squads are made up of experienced innovators in Product Management, QA, Design, DevOps, Software Development, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, and Security. Headquartered in Montreal, our technology organization has been growing at a rate of 2X year-over-year and is doubling once again in 2021 as we expand across Canada, US, and Europe.

WORLD CLASS PLATFORM

The SSENSE platform runs on Amazon Web Services making use of serverless microservices across web, mobile and app. Our event-source architecture already achieves over 10,000 requests / second and growing at an unmatched pace, currently unseen across the industry. Our data-driven culture of innovation empowers every product team across the tech organization to explore building, testing and learning with the latest in Machine Learning techniques. Our automated continuous improvement DevOps model (making use of both blue / green and canary deployments) results in an average of 50 production releases every day.

Read more about us on our SSENSE Tech Blog.