Blockchain Lead

Our client, currently self-described as “a blockchain enhancement which enables smart contracts to securely perform complex computations in standard programming languages at reduced gas costs”, partnered with us to identify and pursue its new product direction. This initiative will result in a delivery effort of a new product direction as well as execution on some of the existing backlog items necessary to continue to engage the current platform users.

Role Specifics:

• Design of best in class technical solutions for current and future products, establishing best practices and selection of best-fit modern tools.
• Implementation of system design with focus on Resilience, Scalability, Security and Telemetry
• Design of evolutionary code architecture to support a new growing business line
• Evaluation and recommendation for tooling and libraries, to support your plan
• Aligning with the current DevOps plan and CI/CD processes and iteratively evolving.
• Support Quality Assurance on the team and lead the team to quality driven solutions.
• Language(s) and platforms - (Current and future laundry list) - JavaScript/web3.js, C, C++, Rust, bash, Solidity, Python, HTML/PHP
• Tooling - WebAssembly, WASI SDK, Docker, Kubernetes
• Infrastructure (cloud provider) - AWS, Ethereum, IPFS, Geth/Clef
• Integrations / services - The Kubernetes ecosystem
• Conducting tactical and strategic research projects from scoping through to implementation, creatively making use of the most appropriate methods and tools
• Lead the development team, coaching and mentoring the engineers that participate in product development, considering industry best practices.
• Translating research findings into easily communicable artifacts, use cases, videos, storyboarding.

You are an Agile Team Member

Job #1 is to be part of a self-organizing team – a team that solves complex challenges and builds working software. Being a good team member means you contribute to its success by:

• Collaborating with your PO to groom backlog and break down stories into small functional slices
• Maintaining an attitude of commitment through outward display of willingness.
• Impressing responsibility on others by displaying ownership in tasks.
• Practicing positive interactions – lean on encouragement in place of judgment.
• Being open to new ideas and encouraging innovative practices amongst peers
• Actively working on broadening or adding a skill
• Asking for assistance when problems become challenging
• Balancing best practice decisions with delivering high business value (right vs right now)
• Delivers stories/tasks that are “committed” within a timebox

You are also the Principal Engineer (AKA Solutions Architect)

The Principal Engineer is considered the premier developer on the team. It is therefore your responsibility to engineer large-scale solutions that enable the business while supporting the strategic architectural vision of quality, scalability, performance and function.

Principal Accountability | Technical Sprint Planning

• Owns technical design for a sprint including high-level flow diagrams, ERD, service contracts
• Ensures the whole team understands the technical plan, reasons for it, and adherence to it.
• Considers testability in design with focus on code determinism, abstraction, and modularity
• Commands a broad awareness of dependent projects and considers them in design
• Helps team members define clear, small, and testable tasks
• Frequently thinks out loud about design with the team and a higher level design committee
• Works with Enterprise Architects to ensure a team’s direction is in line with the enterprise vision
• Defines technical acceptance criteria (where necessary) for each story
• Owns/manages the technical backlog and works with PO to schedule those efforts

Principal Accountability | Software Development

• Communicates important details of the solution design to everyone on the team
• Encourages collective code ownership through CI and promotes frequent code check-ins (daily)
• Practices and teaches unit test development to achieve at least 80% code coverage
• Addresses technical debt constantly - escalating when it becomes risky to time or quality
• Develops with an awareness for team needs and acts as resource/mentor for junior members
• Oversees the merge up/down process
• Carries out root cause analysis on defects to ensure fixes are happening in the right way
• Keeps an up-to-date local development environment to reduce risk

Principal Accountability | Software Inspection

• Ensures daily code check-ins (through spot checks) are happening by each member of the team
• Employs static code analysis to identify code readability, anti-patterns, vulnerabilities & defects
• Monitors unit level test results after code is committed and holds team to account on quality
• Considers cyclomatic complexity of code and drives project refactors where necessary
• Enforces transparency of the inspection process via Continuous Integration and reporting
• Enforces the team’s Definition of Done
• Reviews QA test plans for technical coverage
• Conducts cross team and inter-team code reviews

Principal Accountability | Release Planning

• Drives and adheres to a well-defined code promotion process
• Supports and is accountable for timely releases and adherence to release activities
• Resolves defects in a timely and effective manner
• Identifies tactical risks and raises/resolves issues effectively
• Ensures that operational teams are effective during deployment (dry-run or production)
• Follows up with infrastructure to create service accounts, permissions, access rights, etc
• Creates deployment documentation which outlines WHERE & WHAT?

Principal Accountability | Community

• Collaborates outside of the product team to encourage a development community
• Establishes and carries out formal and informal educational sessions (lunch & learn, etc)
• Liaises between the team and management to assure needed skills are represented on the team
• Encourages self-study by promoting best practices and bringing in external perspective