Senior Software Architect

Senior Software Architect

Matee Product Team | Digital Harbor

About Digital Harbor

Digital Harbor is a technology company building software products that help organizations and people connect, collaborate, and work more effectively. Our teams operate in an entrepreneurial, product-focused environment where engineers have meaningful ownership, work closely with Product Management, and turn ambitious ideas into dependable software.

About Matee & the Opportunity

Matee focuses on interactive, social, and engaging text experiences. We are seeking a hands-on Senior Software Architect to own the technical direction of Matee, build alongside the team, and lead delivery of responsive, scalable experiences that encourage meaningful user participation. This is a player-coach role—not an architecture-only or people-management-only position.

What You’ll Do

• Own and evolve Matee’s end-to-end software architecture, translating product vision and functional and nonfunctional requirements into pragmatic technical designs and implementation plans.
• Design and implement high-quality production code; lead by example through complex feature development, design reviews, automated code reviews, testing, debugging, and technical problem-solving.
• Architect live, formatted typing experiences that drive social interaction and collaboration.
• Make sound decisions about service boundaries, API contracts, data models, state management, asynchronous workflows, caching, observability, and reliability.
• Build secure, performant web applications and backend services with thoughtful approaches to authentication, authorization, data privacy, abuse prevention, and resilient error handling.
• Partner closely with Product Management and design to clarify ambiguous requirements, assess tradeoffs, estimate work, prioritize technical debt, and define achievable milestones.
• Own technical execution across the release lifecycle, including delivery planning, CI/CD practices, testing strategy, production readiness, monitoring, incident response, and post-release improvements.
• Lead and mentor engineers, establish clear engineering standards, provide actionable feedback, remove blockers, and support accountability and growth.
• Use AI-assisted engineering tools responsibly to accelerate development, testing, documentation, and refactoring while retaining human ownership of architecture, correctness, security, and maintainability.
• Collaborate with engineering peers and other product teams to promote reusable patterns, clear interfaces, and consistent technical quality.

Required Qualifications

• 7 years of professional software engineering experience delivering production applications through the full development lifecycle.
• Significant experience designing, evolving, and maintaining software architecture for customer-facing web or SaaS products, including decisions made under real scale and delivery constraints.
• Demonstrated hands-on expertise with JavaScript/TypeScript, modern frontend development, and backend services; ability to evaluate and guide framework choices based on product needs.
• Strong experience with HTTP APIs (including REST), integrations, relational databases, schema design, and performance troubleshooting.
• Working knowledge of asynchronous messaging/event-driven patterns, real-time communication approaches (such as WebSockets or server-sent events), and scalable notification or activity systems.
• Experience with cloud-hosted applications, automated testing, version control, CI/CD, production monitoring, and secure software development practices.
• Experience leading and mentoring software engineers while remaining a meaningful individual technical contributor.
• Ability to communicate architecture and technical tradeoffs clearly to engineers, product partners, and business stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Java, Spring/Spring Boot, and relational database technologies in production environments.
• Experience designing highly interactive social, community, messaging, collaboration, or content-engagement products.
• Familiarity with distributed systems, queues or pub/sub, search/indexing, caching, and analytics or instrumentation for user engagement.
• Experience improving development velocity through AI coding assistants, automated quality checks, and architecture that supports modular, testable implementation.
• Experience working in an entrepreneurial, fast-growing product company where priorities evolve and engineers are expected to exercise ownership.

How You’ll Succeed

You balance long-term architecture with shipping useful product increments; stay close to the code; coach without becoming a bottleneck; surface risks early; and build systems that are easy for other engineers—including those using AI-assisted development tools—to understand, test, extend, and operate.

Equal Employment Opportunity

Digital Harbor is an equal opportunity employer. We consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, veteran status, or any other status protected by applicable law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees with disabilities in accordance with applicable law.