Staff Engineer

A technical leadership role responsible for the architecture, design direction, and technical strategy of the Connectors product area.

Working under the overall guidance of the Solution Architect, this role provides hands-on technical leadership and architectural direction to the software engineers responsible for implementing individual connectors. The Product-Level Architect ensures that all connectors adhere to a consistent framework, design standards, and security principles, while remaining performant, maintainable, and extensible.

This role is expected to be roughly a 50% / 50% between product level architecture and writing code.  It is ideal for those people who want to be involved with architecture but still want to write code.

This position combines architectural vision with practical engineering know-how — setting standards, reviewing implementations, and occasionally contributing to core framework code to ensure quality and alignment across all integrations.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the technical architecture for the Connectors product family.
• Provide technical leadership and direction to development teams, ensuring adherence to design patterns and integration standards.
• Work closely with the Solution Architect to align product-level architecture with the wider system architecture.
• Design, evolve, and maintain shared libraries, and framework components used across connectors.
• Lead architectural reviews and mentor engineers on best practices in system design, performance, and scalability.
• Evaluate third-party APIs, SDKs, and data models to determine optimal integration patterns.
• Define non-functional requirements such as security, performance, scalability, and observability for connector solutions.
• Ensure all integrations follow security by design principles and comply with internal and industry standards.
• Document architectural decisions, maintain technical diagrams, and author reference implementations.
• Collaborate with the Product Owner to balance technical debt and new feature development.
• Engage in hands-on prototyping or complex debugging where deep expertise is needed.
• Stay current with evolving technologies relevant to integration, connectivity, and distributed systems.

• Understanding of security best practices: OAuth2, JWT, TLS, and “security by design” principles.
• Proficient in .NET Core &/or C, C++ & C#
• Familiarity with messaging and event technologies such as MQTT
• Strong understanding of software design principles — modularity, SOLID, and domain-driven design.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and code quality tooling.
• Strong understanding of containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with cloud services (Azure, AWS or GCP also valuable).
• Proven ability to guide others in code design, review, and system decomposition.
• Experience implementing monitoring and observability (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, App Insights).

• Engineering degree or equivalent or suitable experience.
• Minimum of 5+ years of related industry experience.
• Proven experience designing and implementing scalable backend or integration architecture.
• Understanding of security best practices: OAuth2, JWT, TLS, and “security by design” principles.
• Proven experience designing and implementing scalable backend or integration architectures.
• Familiar creating multiple representative deployment environments to validate our solution.
• Experience of the access control industry.
• Experience developing networked applications in an enterprise environment would be an advantage.