Senior Software Architect

ISKME is hiring a software architect to lead the development of architecture and infrastructure for products and services that affect millions of educators and students worldwide. The person in this position will ensure that the products we build reflect the values of ISKME, including addressing the diverse needs of users in the field of open education. As an education nonprofit, ISKME is a mission-driven organization with the goal of democratizing access to education for all. We value a diverse workforce and are an inclusive environment.

The ideal candidate is a strong communicator, values a collaborative team environment, has experience mentoring and guiding developers, and is a senior level programmer who writes modular, tested, and maintainable code. The person in this technical leadership role will own architecture and technical product vision, and its alignment to business and technical objectives.

Roles and Responsibilities

• Ensure adherence to effective software development practices, such as Scrum, unit testing, and peer code reviews.
• Manage product quality, including quality standards for code and test coverage. Ensure high quality, maintainable code by a team is being developed.
• Follow and promote security best practices and Security by Design.
• Implement effective monitoring and measurement strategies.
• Support Product Owner and UX to translate product ideas into technically feasible user stories.
• Manage and reduce technical debt, while continuously improving security, maintainability, and scalability of products and processes.
• Provide ongoing technical mentoring to teams and individuals.
• Identify obstacles and unnecessary friction, and raise them to product and engineering management for remediation.
• Actively participate as a leader in planning and look-ahead meetings.
• Present and discuss technology and architecture in interactive meetings with existing and prospective customers and partners. Represent ISKME at technical conferences.

Required Skills

• Expert level competence in Python and demonstrated competence in multiple other programming languages

• Can build and maintain scalable, end-to-end, performant SaaS applications with high uptime and high user satisfaction.

• Demonstrated ability to synthesize context (use cases, customer needs, development team capacity and abilities) with technology to make recommendations on strategy, implementation, testing, and deployment.

• Can work within the AWS cloud ecosystem, understanding effective and secure utilization of the different service offerings.

• Understand benefits and pitfalls associated with distributed systems, microservices architectures, and “serverless”.

• Able to develop well-reasoned, well-documented, and secure APIs for distributed applications.

• Understand tradeoffs between relational and non-relational databases, and can design efficient apps for sharing and storage of unstructured data.

• Shape a culture of code quality, automation, and operational excellence, with unit/integration tests, fuzzing, and CI pipelines.

• Understand and use security and privacy best practices for cloud-hosted services, including server hardening, network hardening, access policies, authentication protocols, and encryption standards.

• Experience employing metrics to monitor and report on system and business health. You are well versed in all aspects of metrics: efficient collection, aggregation, and reporting; analysis and reporting; determination of which metrics are useful for a given purpose; and using metrics to support continuous improvement.

• Proven ability to communicate technical issues and priorities to all roles in the organization.

ISKME is committed to Equal Opportunity and does not promote or discriminate against any person, population group, or organization and is committed through its employment and hiring practices as well as in its provision of services to ensure that all employees and applicants as well as others receive equal consideration and treatment, regardless of race, color, creed, gender (including gender identity or gender expression), religion, marital or domestic partner status, age, national origin or ancestry, physical appearance, education background, language, mental or medical disability, sex, sexual orientation, citizenship, military service status, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by state or federal law or local ordinance.