Director of Platform Architecture

Director of Platform Architecture

Overview

We are seeking a senior leader with the vision, technical expertise, and strategic mindset to drive the transformation of our platform. In this role, you will play a critical role in modernizing our complex, legacy-based system, improving platform quality, and ensuring our technology infrastructure is scalable, efficient, and aligned with our business goals. Additionally, you will be responsible for building and managing a high-performing team, attracting top-tier talent, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and accountability. 

The Challenge

Our platform, built over the past two decades, has been a cornerstone of our growth and success. Its flexibility has allowed us to innovate and scale, serving a diverse range of customers and use cases. As we look to the future, we are focusing more on modernization and scalability to position ourselves for the next stage of growth. We’re excited about the performance and efficiency improvements underway, increasing automation coverage, and several impactful projects on the roadmap—all designed to enhance our platform and drive even greater customer satisfaction and business agility.

What We Need: We are looking for a visionary leader who can drive the transformation of our platform. The ideal candidate will:

• Bring strong and clear vision to drive the transformation of our platform
• Develop and execute an aggressive yet realistic roadmap for platform modernization.
• Build and lead a team of top-tier talent, ensuring capacity and budget for execution.
• Establish and maintain high standards of quality, pushing for excellence in every aspect.
• Elevate platform to be efficient, agile, reliable to support a shared mission business growth & customer needs.
• Focus on achieving measurable goals, committed to delivering impactful results.

Responsibilities:

Some sample projects that this role will take on:

Platform Quality Improvement Strategy

• Conduct a thorough analysis of platform quality issues, identifying pain points and categorizing them for prioritization.
• Deliver a strategic game plan with clear, measurable objectives and improvement strategies.
• Execute the improvement strategies, ensuring timely delivery and effectiveness.

Enhance Automation Coverage:

• Achieve high test automation coverage across the platform.
• Automate a significant portion of the CI/CD pipeline processes.
• Substantially reduce regression issues, enhancing overall stability.

Improve Architecture:

• Perform an in-depth architecture audit to identify and address major design flaws.
• Resolve critical stability issues to enhance platform reliability.
• Refactor a significant portion of legacy code, modernizing the platform’s infrastructure.
• Optimize system performance to improve efficiency.

Ensure Code Quality:

• Establish and enforce rigorous code quality standards and processes.
• Ensure complete compliance with these standards across all development teams.

Talent Management

• Recruit and onboard the required talent for the transformation team.
• Foster a culture of ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
• Set and achieve a high team engagement score through effective leadership and support.

Mobile App Rewrite

• Lead the complete rewrite of our mobile application to improve user experience, performance, and maintainability.
• Implement modern design principles and ensure seamless integration with backend services.

Internal Partners & Stakeholders

• Product Team: Collaborate closely with the Product team to align platform improvements with business goals, customer needs, and market demands.
• Executive Leadership: Work with senior leadership to secure resources, align strategic goals, and communicate progress on key initiatives.
• Engineering & QA Teams: Partner with internal engineeringand quality assurance team to implement the necessary changes, drive test automation, and enhance overall platform stability and performance.
• Customer Success: Engage with the Customer Success team to ensure platform improvements directly contribute to better customer experiences and satisfaction.

Qualifications:

• Experience: Over 10 years in software development, with substantial experience in legacy and modern stacks, platform modernization, and advanced technology integration.
• Technical Expertise: Deep knowledge of software architecture, design principles, best practices, cloud technologies, DevOps, CI/CD, and microservices.
• Leadership Skills: Proven ability to build and lead high-performing teams, drive large-scale transformation projects, and manage complex systems.
• Problem Solver: Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, capable of diagnosing issues and implementing effective solutions.
• Strategic and Hands-On: Ability to balance strategic vision with hands-on technical involvement, driving both long-term goals and day-to-day operations.
• Quality Improvement: Experience developing and implementing strategies to improve software quality, addressing bugs, performance issues, architectural refinements, and requirement gaps.
• Communication: Excellent communication and interpersonal skills, capable of engaging with technical and non-technical stakeholders at all levels.
• Education: Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Our current tech stack

• PHP, Yii, Apache
• MySQL and Elastic Search
• CSS Modules and Sass
• React, Marionette.js, Backbone
• Docker, Git
• Redis, Memcached
• RabbitMQ
• AWS, Azure or Google Cloud

Background

Helping large companies innovate isn’t easy, but it is vital.  Vital to creating new jobs. Vital to igniting growth. Vital to ensuring a safe, healthy and prosperous future of billions around the globe.

However, innovation at large companies is a mess. Employees have lots of ideas on how to improve a business, but with no formal process, their suggestions go unheard and they give up trying to make a difference. Corporate innovation labs are expected to support countless different activities to promote innovation but lack the right tools for the job.  Executives are seeing disruption everywhere they look and investing millions, but still have no idea where their “next big thing” will come from, or if it will come at all.

At Brightidea, we’ve built a platform that’s solving those problems. We’ve been helping corporate R&D teams be more efficient with the 1.5 Trillion dollars invested annually.

Our Team

Brightidea’s Engineering team is a diverse group of humble people that love to work together and are constantly trying new things. The team fosters learning and experimenting in an open, collaborative environment. We continuously deliver and believe in the right tool for the job. 

We believe that everyone has the ability to make a difference and that a diverse team generates more innovation and bigger ideas. Just as our product invites organizations to crowd source innovation across their workforce, Brightidea is inclusive and does not discriminate. We accept everybody.