Principal Architect, Affinity
$220-290k
Relationship intelligence company
Open for applications
Relationship intelligence company
201-500 employees
Open for applications
$220-290k
201-500 employees
Company mission
Affinity's mission is to create a world where anyone can cultivate and fully harness their network to succeed, by building a new kind of infrastructure to power all relationship-driven industries and applications.
Role
Who you are
- Experience: 12+ years in software engineering with a strong background in system architecture and design. 3+ years leading architectural decisions across a large organization or product suite
- Technical Expertise: Deep understanding of distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred), and data processing. Expertise in one or more programming languages such as Ruby (preferred) or Python. Affection for monoliths is a plus
- Leadership: Proven track record of mentoring engineers, with the ability to influence without direct authority. Experience guiding teams through significant technical and architectural changes. You strive to make everyone around you better
- Communication: Exceptional ability to articulate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences
- Problem-Solving: Strong analytical skills with a methodical approach to solving complex technical problems. Your tradeoff decisions are grounded in reality vs theory
- Cross-team collaboration: demonstrated success working across engineering, product management, and design
What the job involves
- As a Principal Architect, you will shape the technical landscape of Affinity's platform, ensuring scalability, performance, and innovation
- You will operate across the entire engineering organization, driving the architectural vision and aligning it with our business objectives
- The results of your work will show in the quality of the product we deliver and the delight of our customers
- It will also show in the internal developer experience as we are able to tackle greater challenges with ease
- Reporting to the CTO, you will be a member of the Engineering Executive team
- You will be a key influencer and collaborator, working with engineering directors, engineers, product management, and design to drive our architectural strategy and technical roadmap
- Your focus will be on defining and maintaining a clear architectural vision, leading critical decisions, and ensuring alignment with our long-term strategy
- You will lead initiatives to address technical debt, enhance scalability and stability, and introduce new technologies
- The breadth of this role won’t allow you to be writing code all the time, but we estimate that 25% of your time will be hands-on-keyboard
- Deep understanding of our product, customers, and forward-looking opportunities
- Define and lead the architectural strategy, ensuring scalability, reliability, and performance
- Collaborate across teams to align on priorities and execute shared goals
- Develop and maintain forward-looking technical roadmaps focused on addressing technical debt, scalability, and sustainability
- Lead initiatives and projects in collaboration with cross-functional partners
- Innovate and integrate new technologies to drive platform evolution
- Mentor engineers at all levels and share expertise in architectural best practices
- Oversee documentation quality, technical reviews, and architectural consistency
- Contribute to code and review, setting the standard for code quality
- Our platform is built with React and TypeScript on the front end, with Ruby and PostgreSQL on the back end
- We’re leaning into event-driven architecture using Kafka
- Our infrastructure is hosted by AWS and runs on Kubernetes
- We use Python, Spark, and SQL for data engineering, with Databricks for compute and orchestration and Delta Lake for storage
- We also utilize LLMs for data normalization and specialized tasks
- We iterate quickly. As such, you must be comfortable embracing ambiguity, be able to cut through it, and deliver value to our customers
- We are candid, transparent, and speak our minds while simultaneously caring personally with each person we interact with
- We make data-driven decisions and make the best decision for the moment based on the information available
Our take
Up to 90% of company profiles in traditional customer relationship management systems (CRMs) are incomplete or out-of-date, causing missed sales opportunities and wasted time. Affinity exists to change this state of affairs, using AI to analyse a company's communications and interactions to provide the most accurate profile possible, powering sales and excellent customer relationships.
While other modern CRMs exist, few of them are able to automate data input on the scale of Affinity, which has processed around 20 trillion emails and hundreds of thousands of calendar events to date. It also focuses on industries that are underserved in the CRM sector, including investment banking and real estate. This has grown it a client base of more than 1,800 customers including major enterprises such as Bain Capital Ventures, Nike and Twilio.
Affinity is focusing on expanding its sales, marketing, and engineering teams to grow its customer base and develop new products. As companies look to both improve the performance of their sales teams and reduce costs in manual data entry, Affinity's product is likely to remain extremely popular.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
93% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 4 rounds)
Sep 2021
$80m
SERIES C
Feb 2019
$26.5m
SERIES B
Total funding: $122.6m
Company benefits
- Daily lunches
- Commuter passes
- Flexible PTO
- Free events
- Tech pack
- Retirement options
- Work from home opportunities
- Health insurance
- Grocery allowance
Company HQ
Jackson Square, San Francisco, CA
Leadership
Ray Zhou
(Co-CEO)Studied Computer Science at Stanford and was a Genomics Researcher at UC Davis.
Shubham Goel
(Co-CEO)Started out as a Software Developer at inoXapps and was a Partner at the Dorm Room Fund. Is one of Forbes's 30 Under 30.
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