Product Architect

• A collaborative attitude: It’s critical that the person in this role is able to work collaboratively with the product manager and executive sponsors to define the product, manage scope, and balance business needs, user needs, and technical elegance/complexity. Additionally, the Product Architect should be actively involved in development communities.

• A product mindset: Unlike creating a solution to a client consulting problem, where the primary focus is on solving a client’s near-term, specific requirements, developing a product requires a mindset with a longer time horizon and generalizing a product to address requirements across numerous companies. Since we will be enhancing and extending a product over time, this requires more careful thought about generalizing the solution beyond a single customer, service and component selections (manageability, viability, stability, etc.), impact of upgrades on operations and existing customers;

• A code-last mentality: We will assemble solutions by leveraging existing — primarily open-source — services and components wherever possible and practical, and will seek to limit the functionality that we build to that which will provide us with differentiating capabilities;

• Experience managing distributed development teams: The development team will reside in Bucharest, while product management and design will likely reside in the U.S. The Product Architect must be able to manage the development team including: provide direction and feedback, conduct code reviews, travel to U.S. as necessary, and collaborate with product management and design colleagues during working hours across time zones;

• Experience architecting Internet applications: The Product Architect should be skilled at technical problem solving, and possess a deep understanding of Internet architectures, SaaS offerings, and issues such as globalization, application security, and multi-tenacy; languages such as php, java, and python; and technologies such as Drupal, Alfresco, and Django.

• Operational experience: The Product Architect will be responsible for defining operating environments, security and backup strategies, guidelines and processes for change control, performance monitoring.

Education:
Bachelors or masters in Computer Science or a related engineering discipline.

Experience:
At least ten years of commercial software product development experience, including at least three years of experience managing development teams and delivering and operating best-of-breed web-based applications.