JOB DESCRIPTION:
Wimba’s Product Development team is expanding and seeking a Chief Software Architect. This key role is primarily to provide technology and architectural software design leadership across the development team and it project initiatives, driven by and aligned with business and market strategy and requirements. The product development landscape of projects and team will offer the opportunity to design, build, enhance and maintain the platform and functional software services and frameworks required to drive a highly scalable, next generation, feature rich, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration suite for the educational market. This position reports to the VP of Development / CTO.
In this key role, your core responsibilities will include:
- designing, implementing key elements of, and overseeing the software architecture for, the core product collaboration suite functional services as well as its underlying platform services.
- providing technical direction, input and participation in the product related strategy and decision-making across the project team’s developers, product managers, qa analysts etc as well as in cross-functional product life cycle management initiatives.
- hands-on design and implementation tasks for key/select areas, guidance on subsystem and service-level test design/coverage, and driving performance/reliability/high-availability and scalable deployment dimensions of the all development projects.
- key stakeholder in the product and technical design and development processes, and its associated documentation set such as market requirements, technical specifications, functional specifications and test plans.
- key contributor to the level-of-effort scoping of, and the resource/skills allocation for, all proposed product development project initiatives resulting from the requirements driven product life cycle management processes.
- key contributor in defining the overall architecture dependent deployment and infrastructure stack (i.e. software stack, hardware deployment, saas operations etc) evaluation, selection, design and implementation tasks.
- provide technical leadership, direction and mentoring for all team developers and rich media (i.e. audio, video, voIP, app sharing etc) delivery technologies
- leadership of an internal team of senior developers/architects as an architects “council” or workgroup with ongoing responsibility for identifying and resolving architectural decisions as it relates to new as well as existing products.
- participate and/or represent the company in respective software open standards bodies and associated projects.
REQUIREMENTS
The ideal candidate will possess demonstrable experience in the following areas:
- BS/MS in Computer Science or equivalent.
- 10+ years of progressively advancing development experience.
- 5+ years architecture or technical leadership experience developing production, multi-tier Java/J2EE software systems.
- strong experience designing, documenting, and communicating high-level and detailed software architecture, and working with small teams to develop these architectures.
- strong written and verbal communication skills, and an ability to tailor communication styles to different audiences (technical developers, less technical product managers, and external/customer audiences).
- strong Java 5+ skills and object oriented design experience, including typical patterns such as MVC, SOA, IoC.
- strong experience with developing scalable and highly available software systems, including evaluating architectural scalability limitations, estimating availability, and designing solutions to improve both.
- strong experience designing modular software architectures emphasizing efficient ongoing development.
- strong experience with modern software interface/API paradigms and frameworks (e.g. RESTful Web Services, JSON, Atom, RSS, XML/XSLT Schema, Relax NG.)
- strong experience developing customer-facing and/or public APIs and/or SDKs; evaluating customer/partner requirements, prioritizing, architecting solutions, and supporting customers building extensions using these APIs and/or SDKs.
- experience defining and participating in architectural design reviews and implementation code reviews.
- strong experience with:
- servlets/JSP/JSF
- HTML/CSS/Javascript/Ajax
- Spring and Hibernate
- database design and SQL; Postgres a plus
- web services standards and frameworks
- JUnit / unit testing
- experience interacting with standards-bodies and/or open-source communities, especially in a leadership role.
Highly Desired Skills/Experience
We are especially interested in candidates with specific domain knowledge in one or more of the following areas:
- experience with real-time collaboration/communication systems (as opposed to transactional systems), including:
- XMPP (particularly openfire)
- VoIP/Video (particularly asterisk)
- Other whiteboarding, electronic whiteboarding, or collaboration systems
- rich media (i.e. audio, video, voIP, app sharing etc) delivery technologies
- rich media oriented content repositories and/or content management systems
- web and mobile delivery client-server technologies and platforms
- dynamic resource allocation deployment environments (i.e. CPU-on demand services, dynamic reconfiguration, cloud computing paradigms)
- strong experience with leveraging and/or participating in open-source/community software projects including good knowledge of the legal/licensing considerations and constraints of such initiatives
- educational software product experience in general in the field of educational technology (software systems used by K12 or higher-ed institutions)
ABOUT US
Wimba is a leading provider of collaborative software for distance and blended learning. The Wimba Collaboration Suite, recently awarded the 2009 “Best Education Solution” CODiE award by SIIA, enhances learning, improves outcomes and increases student retention. By combining interactive technologies such as voice, video, podcasting, instant messaging, application sharing, polling and whiteboarding, learning communities are empowered with a unique collaborative environment that fosters dynamic student-to-instructor, student-to-student, and instructor-to-instructor interaction. Our seamless integration with leading course management systems ensures that users have a simplified and familiar workflow. Wimba People Teach People.
Wimba is a dynamic, entrepreneurial organization that is always looking for high caliber people. We offer competitive salaries, stock options and a full benefit package as well as provide a fun work environment!
Visit our web site for more information: www.wimba.com
To submit your resume, please email recruiting@wimba.com a copy of your Word or pdf resume.