Principal Software Architect (Platform)

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    "description": "<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold\">OPERATIVE OVERVIEW</span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Operative builds the software that powers the business of advertising for the world's leading media companies. Our platforms manage the full advertising lifecycle — from sales planning and order management to trafficking, analytics, and billing — across linear TV, streaming, and digital channels.</span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Built on a modern, cloud-native SaaS architecture with microservices at its core, the Operative platform is engineered to handle the scale and operational demands of the world's largest broadcasters and publishers. Operative is actively developing AI Agents — both to enhance the capabilities of our platform and to augment how our engineering teams work. Engineers at Operative have access to AI tooling as a standard part of their workflow, and we are investing in building increasingly autonomous agents that accelerate development.</span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"> </span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"> </span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold\">Position Overview</span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Operative is seeking an experienced architect with a strong hands-on engineering background and a demonstrated ability to operate independently and drive the technical quality of the teams and codebases they engage with. This individual will serve as a senior technical authority across Operative's platform engineering disciplines, spanning backend services, distributed data infrastructure, and cloud-native architecture.</span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"> </span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">This role represents a significant opportunity to shape how a complex, high-scale platform evolves — identifying the highest-priority technical investments, establishing the standards and patterns the broader team will follow, and driving those initiatives from inception through delivery. AI adoption and maturity is a strategic priority at Operative, and this individual will play a direct role in advancing both the use of AI within engineering workflows and the development of agentic capabilities within the platform itself. The successful candidate will bring both architectural breadth and hands-on depth, and will be motivated by the opportunity to work at the intersection of modern platform engineering and applied AI.</span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"> </span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold\">Key Responsibilities</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Architect and lead delivery of complex, cross-functional initiatives spanning backend services, data pipelines, and cloud infrastructure</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Drive the adoption and maturity of AI within engineering workflows, including agentic tooling, AI-assisted development practices, and the integration of autonomous AI agents into platform capabilities</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Identify systemic technical challenges across reliability, performance, scalability, and observability, and own the path to resolution</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Define and uphold engineering standards across code quality, testing practices, API design, data modeling, and deployment patterns</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Make well-reasoned architectural decisions in ambiguous or rapidly evolving situations, and communicate those decisions clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Engage across the full technology stack; this role requires both breadth and depth, with the ability to move fluidly between system-level architecture and hands-on implementation</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Partner with Product and business stakeholders to translate complex requirements into coherent technical strategy</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Provide mentorship and technical guidance to engineers across the broader global team through design reviews, documentation, code review, and direct collaboration</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Serve as a senior escalation point for complex or high-impact engineering problems</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"> </span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold\">Qualities and Working Style</span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Beyond technical depth, Operative is looking for specific qualities that define how this individual will work:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Operates with a high degree of autonomy and self-direction; identifies what needs to be done without requiring close oversight</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Holds strong technical opinions grounded in experience, while remaining pragmatic about tradeoffs and context</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Approaches ambiguity as a problem to be solved rather than a barrier to progress</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Remains hands-on as a practitioner; this is an engineering leadership role, not a purely advisory one</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Has a track record of being a go-to resource for difficult, cross-cutting engineering challenges</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Communicates technical concepts effectively to cross-functional audiences, including product and business stakeholders</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"> </span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold\">Technical Requirements</span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Candidates should demonstrate strong proficiency across the following areas:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li>Java / Spring Boot</li>\n<li>Python</li>\n<li>Kafka / Kafka Connect</li>\n<li>Kubernetes</li>\n<li>AWS</li>\n<li>Elasticsearch</li>\n<li>MongoDB</li>\n<li>SQL</li>\n<li>Redis</li>\n<li>Serverless / Lambda</li>\n<li>S3 / Object Storage</li>\n<li>CI/CD &amp; DevOps</li>\n</ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"> </span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Depth across all areas is not required; candidates should be able to engage effectively across the stack and demonstrate strong expertise in several. Familiarity with the following areas is also valued:</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Distributed systems design, including event sourcing, CQRS, and saga patterns</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Platform observability, including distributed tracing, metrics infrastructure, and structured logging at scale</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Data pipeline architecture, including stream processing, schema evolution, and backpressure management</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Security and compliance practices within cloud-native environments</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"> </span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold\">Qualifications</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">10 or more years of software engineering experience with demonstrated scope at the architectural level</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Prior experience as a senior technical owner of a complex distributed system, with accountability beyond individual contribution</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Track record of identifying, prioritizing, and driving technical initiatives independently, not solely executing a defined roadmap</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Experience working effectively within globally distributed engineering organizations</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Demonstrated ability to improve the technical quality of a team or platform in a measurable and lasting way</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Background in SaaS platform engineering, with an understanding of the operational demands of continuously available systems</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"> </span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: bold\">What Operative Offers</span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">A senior role with broad technical scope and direct influence over platform direction</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">The opportunity to provide technical leadership across a global engineering organization</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Competitive compensation commensurate with experience and scope of impact</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\">Flexible remote-first work environment</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"> </span></p>\n<p><span style=\"font-family: Inter, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt\"><em>Operative cares about your privacy and protecting your data. By submitting an application for a position with Operative, you acknowledge that you have read the following and consent to how Operative treats your data: 1) the Candidate Privacy Policy available at https://www.operative.com/candidate-privacy-notice/ (or if you are a candidate from Israel the Candidate Privacy Notice (Israel), available at https://www.operative.com/candidate-privacy-notice-israel/, and 2) the Candidate Notice for Data Transfer and Retention available at https://www.operative.com/candidate-notice/.</em></span></p>",
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