VeriFast Technologies
Website:
verifasttech.com
Job details:
Senior/Principal Software Architect & Engineering Manager
About the Role
We are seeking a Senior/Principal Software Architect & Engineering Manager to provide hands-on technical leadership for our Agentic AI software team.
This is a player-coach role for an experienced software architect who has built and delivered complex commercial software products through multiple complete product lifecycles. You will own the overall software architecture while directly managing a team of approximately 10 software engineers.
We are looking for someone who can think several years ahead architecturally while still being willing to get into the code today.
The right candidate will help us build our Agentic AI platform for long-term scalability, maintainability, security, performance, and customer deployment—rather than continually solving new requirements through patches and one-off solutions.
This is not a pure management position and not an advisory architecture position. You will be expected to remain deeply technical and hands-on.
IDEAL CANDIDATE AND HARD REQUIREMENT
Have you worked for a company which develops, sells, and licenses software? If yes, continue.
We are seeking candidates who have worked for companies who develop, sell, and license software. If you have not done this, you will not be right for this position. We have seen more than 200 resumes, and not one has worked for a company which develops, sells, and licenses software. The candidates are very talented, but have worked on IT Systems SW, Banking/Financial SW, Databases, ERP, Web Apps, Mobile Apps, HR, Business, Management software. Whereas that is impressive, it is not our need. Thanks for understanding.
-------------------------
What You Will Own
You will have overall responsibility for the architecture and engineering execution of our Agentic AI platform, including:
- Define and continuously evolve the overall software architecture.
- Design the product for future scale, extensibility, maintainability, reliability, and performance.
- Make architectural decisions across services, APIs, databases, data pipelines, AI infrastructure, orchestration, deployment, and related software components.
- Identify architectural weaknesses before they become major technical debt.
- Establish clear technical standards, design patterns, interfaces, and development practices.
- Ensure new customer requirements are incorporated through scalable product architecture rather than customer-specific patches or forks.
- Lead major technical design reviews and architecture discussions.
- Personally participate in coding, prototyping, debugging, code reviews, and implementation of critical components.
- Review and improve existing architecture and code where necessary.
- Directly manage approximately 10 software engineers.
- Mentor senior, mid-level, and junior engineers and develop stronger architectural thinking throughout the team.
- Work closely with company technical leadership to translate product vision and technical concepts into scalable software architecture.
- Drive engineering planning, execution, quality, and accountability.
- Establish strong development, testing, release, and deployment processes.
- Own technical decisions related to customer deployment, upgrades, versioning, configuration, security, and supportability.
- Help determine when to refactor, rebuild, or extend existing components.
- Balance near-term delivery requirements with long-term architectural integrity.
What We Are Looking For
Required Experience
- 12+ years of professional software engineering experience.
- Significant experience as a Software Architect, Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, Technical Lead, Engineering Manager, or similar senior technical role.
- Demonstrated experience architecting complex commercial software products sold to external customers.
- Experience taking multiple software products through the complete product lifecycle, from early architecture and initial development through production deployment, scaling, upgrades, maintenance, and future generations.
- Experience with software deployed in customer-controlled or customer-hosted environments, not exclusively SaaS or internally developed corporate applications.
- Strong experience designing software for scalability, modularity, extensibility, reliability, security, and maintainability.
- Strong hands-on software engineering background with the ability and willingness to work directly in the code.
- Experience managing and technically leading software engineering teams.
- Strong understanding of modern software architecture, distributed systems, APIs, databases, concurrency, performance, and system integration.
- Experience making architectural decisions that must support multiple customers, configurations, environments, and future product requirements.
- Strong code review, debugging, troubleshooting, and technical problem-solving skills.
Commercial Product Experience Is Critical
We are specifically looking for someone who understands the difference between developing internal software and building a commercial product that must operate reliably in many different customer environments.
The ideal candidate has dealt firsthand with areas such as:
- Product installation and deployment
- Customer-hosted software
- Software upgrades and migrations
- Backward compatibility
- API and schema versioning
- Configuration management
- Licensing
- Security and access control
- Observability and diagnostics
- Performance and scalability
- Failure recovery
- Dependency management
- Release management
- Automated testing
- Deployment automation
- Supporting multiple customer environments without maintaining customer-specific codebases
- Long-term technical debt management
Hands-On Technical Leadership
We expect this person to remain technically engaged.
You should be comfortable:
- Opening the codebase and understanding how the product actually works.
- Writing code when appropriate.
- Building proof-of-concept implementations for important architectural decisions.
- Debugging difficult production and integration issues.
- Reviewing pull requests and critical code.
- Working directly with engineers to solve difficult technical problems.
- Challenging designs that may work today but will create scalability or maintenance problems later.
- Refactoring or redesigning areas of the product when necessary.
Candidates whose recent experience has been primarily people management, project management, or high-level architecture without hands-on technical involvement are unlikely to be a fit.
Engineering Management
In addition to being the senior architectural leader, you will directly manage the software engineering team.
Responsibilities include:
- Managing approximately 10 software engineers.
- Setting engineering priorities and technical direction.
- Assigning ownership and ensuring accountability.
- Mentoring and developing engineers.
- Improving engineering discipline and software development practices.
- Conducting technical and performance reviews.
- Helping recruit and evaluate future software engineering hires.
- Ensuring the team can execute quickly without sacrificing architectural quality.
- Building a strong engineering culture focused on quality, ownership, practical problem solving, and continuous improvement.
Preferred Experience
Experience in one or more of the following would be valuable but is not required:
- Enterprise software platforms
- Developer tools
- AI/ML or LLM-based applications
- Agentic AI systems
- Retrieval systems, RAG, or GraphRAG
- Knowledge graphs or graph databases
- Large-scale data ingestion and processing
- Search and indexing platforms
- Distributed systems
- Infrastructure software
- Cybersecurity products
- Observability or DevOps platforms
- Complex engineering or scientific software
We value exceptional software architecture and commercial product experience more highly than prior semiconductor-domain knowledge. The domain can be learned.
The Person We Want
You are likely someone who has seen products evolve from an early-stage architecture into mature commercial platforms—and have learned from both successful architectural decisions and decisions that later became expensive technical debt.
You naturally ask questions such as:
- What happens when there are 500 customers instead of 50?
- What happens when the dataset becomes 100 times larger?
- How will we upgrade this component two years from now?
- How do we add capabilities without continually modifying the core?
- How do we support different customer environments without creating separate versions of the product?
- Where are the architectural boundaries?
- What should be configurable versus customized?
- What failures should we anticipate now?
- What will become difficult to change later?
You are comfortable making major architectural decisions, but you are equally comfortable sitting beside an engineer, reviewing code, debugging a difficult issue, or building an implementation yourself.
Level
This position may be hired at either the Senior Software Architect or Principal Software Architect level depending on the candidate's technical depth, architecture ownership, product experience, and demonstrated scope of leadership.
Regardless of level, this position will include direct engineering management responsibilities.
Why This Role Matters
We are building an advanced Agentic AI platform that must support increasingly complex capabilities, growing data volumes, and enterprise customer deployments.
We need an experienced software leader who can ensure that what we build today becomes the foundation for future growth—not something that needs to be repeatedly patched or rewritten as the product and customer base expand.
This person will have significant influence over the long-term technical foundation of the platform and will work directly with company technical leadership and the software engineering team to build that foundation correctly.
Click on Apply to know more.
.png1515730801002){kind=logo}