Sr Architect Developer

Our client have a green fields project to completely re-engineer a business from the ground up using the latest technology, best practices and a high-performance team. They’re a startup that experienced rapid and sustained growth, became a huge success and was recently acquired.
Our client words:

"We’re using Google Cloud’s low-latency, massively-scalable NoSQL Bigtable for its sub-10ms latency and excellent support for log-centric time series data.
We're going with the JVM for the microservice architecture to deliver us the performance, scalability, reliability and security we need. As a platform, it’s rock-solid at megascale.

We chose Kotlin as the JVM language because of its strong support for functional programming, immutable objects, strong null pointer protections and high productivity. And, also, not insignificantly, the joy it is to write.
We’re using a service mesh for service discovery, monitoring, dynamic routing and load balancing. We’re still evaluating which service mesh we’ll go with, with the front-runners being Istio for the control plane and either Envoy or Linkerd for the data plane.

Outside of the service mesh, in its interface with the real world, we are defining our OAS contracts using SwaggerHub for our React/React Native web & mobile clients and also to access 3rd-party service providers like email and payments gateways.

You can see we have a strong emphasis from the database level up on immutable data (in an event sourcing / CQRS design), FP/FRP as the preferred house-style for the services themselves, a strong emphasis on RESTful, idempotent APIs and well-designed boundaries around the services for a clear separation of concerns to maximise distributability."
So, they’re looking for senior architect developers experienced in building high-volume, high-availability systems with low-latency performance constraints. Although they've selected Kotlin over Scala this time, our previous experiences with Scala development highlighted the high standards of architectural thinking in that community and the strengths

Scala devs would bring to a Kotlin development environment.

Specifically, they’re looking for:

• Strong design instincts around immutable designs—at the database layer, data classes / case classes, RESTful and idempotent messaging.
•  API design experience. This is a deeper skill than it appears. It looks easy but, after a few years of learning from mistakes, you realise great API design is actually very subtle and multi-faceted.
•  An interest in alternating between research—into the right tools, architectures, best practices—and hard-core, productive deliverying to the business. We’re not academic at all. We’re a working multimillion euro business aiming to be a half billion euro one through this transformation project; maintaining business continuity throughout is essential.
•  Extensive experience with multi-threading, actor model frameworks, functional reactive programming, synchronous vs asynchronous design trade-offs and building distributed, cloud-native, HA systems.
•  Willingness to collaborate with the DevOps team in a genuine partnership to build our CICD deployment platform and with a firm commitment to TDD, testing and rock-solid production systems.

This is a complex transformation and they’re looking for senior architect developers who want to share their ideas and explore their full creative potential in a team environment. Tthey're looking for developers with strong opinions, who aren’t hesitant in arguing for what they think is right and with the life experiences to be able to back their opinions with sound arguments and specific examples.

They work as a team and highly value a coordinated, team-oriented approach where everyone supports one another.

They believe that we can share, learn and help one another grow as individuals in our technical abilities while producing extraordinarily beautiful and performant architectures. They also need to do that while meeting the practical day-to-day needs of the business, which keeps us focused on commercial realities and the customers for whom we are here to serve and engage.

English level: Upper intermediate.

Time shift: Full time

Location: Amsterdam - Netherlands