Principal, Technology Leader

Be a part of our success story. Launch offers talented and motivated people the opportunity to do the best work of their lives in a dynamic and growing company. Through competitive salaries, outstanding benefits, internal advancement opportunities, and recognized community involvement, you will have the chance to create a career you can be proud of. Your new trajectory starts here at Launch!

The Role:

Launch is actively seeking a passionate and highly skilled Technology Leader who possesses a rich background in spearheading technology initiatives for organizations in a consulting capacity. In this pivotal role at Launch, this individual will be at the forefront of researching and shaping technology roadmaps and offerings across our business units. They will be instrumental in driving sales engineering and client qualification from a technical standpoint, taking charge of technical risk management during project delivery, crafting robust solutions encompassing a wide spectrum of frameworks and technologies within a dynamic landscape, and serving as mentors and advocates within the organization. These responsibilities are extensive, and accomplished Technology Leaders will employ their expertise and experience to influence outcomes through effective delegation and leadership. We are in search of a seasoned candidate who possesses a blend of technical prowess and consultative skills. The ideal candidate will have a well-established track record as a trusted senior advisor, capable of fostering relationships with both customers and internal team members across all organizational levels.

Responsibilities:

• Guide customer conversations, generally related to technical solutioning
• Lead discovery analysis, architecture, design, and development of world-class solutions across a broad spectrum of technologies and design patterns
• Analyze complex business and technical problems related to the implementation of new technology and/or the customization of existing technologies and processes
• Collaborate with clients and business analysts to translate business requirements into technical requirements
• Estimate work efforts and define resourcing required for each phase of a project
• Develop proposals, statements of work, technology strategies, and roadmaps
• Partner with other technology teams to work with business executives and end-users to conceptualize new projects/programs/products, recommend technologies and implementation strategies, and architect/design for requirements of the project within financial and timeline guidelines
• Author and/or review architecture/design and other technical documents ensuring high-quality deliverables and systems development across tech stacks and applications teams
• Establish and/or apply effective software development practices
• Attend regular project meetings, report on progress and setbacks, and participate in both planning and retrospective exercises
• Provide program-level technology leadership with support of peers and/or principal level stakeholders
• Consults with and for peers and solution architects to validate designs, provide recommendations for improvement or addressing gaps, etc.
• Driving development of case studies, whitepapers, and other technology-oriented evangelism
• Effectively communicate with internal and external stakeholders across all levels and disciplines, e.g., from a junior member of an engineering team up to the board of a strategic customer
• Providing technical leadership and consultancy for and in support of other people in the solution architecture discipline.

Required Qualifications:

• 12+ years of relevant work experience is preferred
• Clear and demonstrated extensive experience driving technology strategy on key accounts
• Strong cloud delivery experience, including in at least one of the top three public cloud providers - AWS, Azure, GCP; two or more preferred
• Able to drive effective customer conversations across many potential customer profiles, especially in at least one of tech, finance, energy, healthcare, etc. industries
• Able to develop, write, and defend business case analyses to justify propositions to clients and partners
• Acumen to understand end-to-end strategic business models
• Ability to communicate complex technical and operational solutions, or translate complex topics into a simple business language to drive value alignment for technical or non-technical audiences of varying skillset and seniority
• Ability to self-manage time and priorities in a complex multi-team matrix environment while maintaining high-quality deliverables for oneself as well as your tech teams
• Comfortable actively participating in design and architectural discussions
• Ability to document technical design and approach of software produced
• Work effectively in a fast-paced and constantly changing environment
• Excellent verbal and written communications skills
• Deep experience in at least two of the following technologies/languages/frameworks: .NET, Java, go, node.js, Angular, React
• A strong and varied technical skillset with the ability to compare and identify the tradeoffs of various technologies
• Proven track record of establishing trusted advisor relationships with customers at all levels
• Experience with architecting/implementing solutions leveraging appropriate technical stack
• Knowledge of code coverage, unit/integration tests, TDD/BDD
• Knowledge of CI/CD concepts
• Knowledge and experience with version control systems, e.g., git or others
• Knowledge and experience with software engineering life cycle and best practices
• Knowledge of Scrum software development methodologies
• Web service and application design experience
• Experience in database design and modeling, including relational and non-relational
• Experience with containerized workloads
• Experience designing for secure infrastructure and applications, including topics like Web service security, application security, code scanning, server and/or container security
• Experience in implementing observability and application monitoring topics

Preferred Qualifications:

• Strong preference for experience in multi-cloud design and delivery
• Strong preference for familiarity with capabilities of emerging Generative AI solutions
• Experience in topics like federation, single sign-on, platform integration strongly preferred.
• Experience in communicating concepts, programs, projects to a large non-technical audience such as a public speaking engagement, e.g. community meetup, summit, company event, etc. strongly preferred
• Event-based architecture strongly preferred, Kafka experience is a plus.
• Kubernetes experience
• Experience in a technology evangelist role
• Experience in a startup environment as a technology leader
• Experience in a Fortune 100 environment as a technology leader
• Application monitoring and lifecycle experience strongly preferred
• Experience designing and implementing CI/CD and IaC strongly preferred
• Serverless cloud experience strongly recommended
• Experience with confidential computing is a plus
• Familiarity with Cloud Data Platforms a plus
• Familiarity with AI/ML concepts a plus

Education and Certifications:

• BA/BS Computer Science, Computer Engineering, or related discipline is preferred.
• Certifications are not mandatory, but valuable ones to consider include AWS, Azure, and GCP cloud certifications, particularly those related to roles like Cloud Solution Architect.

Benefits & Compensation:

As an employee at Launch, you will grow your skills and experience through a variety of exciting project work (across industries and technologies) with some of the top companies in the world! Our employees receive full benefits—medical, dental, vision, short-term disability, long-term disability, life insurance, and matched 401k. We also have an uncapped, take-what-you-need PTO policy. The anticipated base wage range for this role is $190,000-$235,000. Education and experience will be highly considered, and we are happy to discuss your wage expectations in more detail throughout our internal interview process.