About LeafLink
LeafLink is the regulated cannabis industry’s largest wholesale marketplace, providing licensed dispensaries the ability to order from their favorite brands, as well as a suite of software tools for those brands to manage and scale their operations.
With over 4,500 retailers and more than 1,500 brands across 25 territories in the US and Canada, LeafLink is setting the industry standard for how cannabis businesses grow together. LeafLink annually processes and manages more than $1 billion in wholesale cannabis orders - you can learn more about our history and path to $1B here http://firstbillion.leaflink.com/.
Our team, backed by funding from leading VC’s, is poised to define the cannabis supply chain through technology. LeafLink was named one of Built In NYC's ‘Best Places to Work in 2020’, as well as one of Fast Company’s ’Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Enterprise for 2018’, joining the ranks of Amazon, Slack, and VMWare - and we’re just getting started!
The Role
LeafLink is seeking an experienced Platform Architect to join our New York City team who is passionate about designing, implementing, and evolving distributed system architecture patterns as well as working with multiple cross-functional, product-driven teams. Seen as a go-to resource within the team, you’ll be advising and working in areas such as high-level system design considerations, research and prototypical work, and a decision-maker and core implementor when it comes to architecture patterns and technology choices. You’ll have the opportunity to build and scale our core platforms and services, mentor and grow others within your areas of focus, and advocate for core engineering best practice adoption throughout our department.
LeafLink is currently gearing up to tackle a large-scale platform overhaul that will strengthen our position as a technical leader within the industry. As such, this role has the opportunity to help shape and grow this new platform and the engineers who work on it, as well as to work within new and growing technologies and concepts such as Python, Node.js, Kubernetes, AWS managed services, aggregate document stores, containerized and serverless design patterns, and service-oriented architectures. It’s a very exciting time to join our engineering team!
Reporting to the VP of Engineering, this role will be responsible for architectural decision making across multiple cross-functional product teams. As we launch new products and services, as well as iterating on existing ones, you’ll help ensure quality coding standards and best practices are maintained and strengthened across the team. With your breadth of experience, you’ll advise on how to best scale our systems as we rapidly grow our userbase and market footprint. Your role will include anticipating technical challenges both far-off and immediate and help guide us as we choose the best solutions, tools, and technologies for each problem.
Ideal candidates for this role possess the ability to strategize, plan, and implement large-scale architectural patterns and systems as well as to promote and foster an inclusive environment focused on mentorship and growth for those around them. This role comes with the opportunity to be a high performer within a department that’s fast-paced, dynamic, and quickly growing in all areas.
The responsibilities described below are representative of those the person in this role would be performing, but should not be considered an exhaustive list - this position is extremely flexible in terms of its areas of focus!
Responsibilities:
- Conceptualize, design, review, demo and implement core infrastructure and building block architecture components and patterns that will allow LeafLink to power the regulated cannabis industry’s commerce needs
- Analyze and evaluate existing solutions within the company and help drive decisions on whether to extend or refactor as needed
- Develop short and long term strategic goals to continue to push LeafLink’s technology offerings forward
- Partner with Product, UX, Engineering, DevOps, Data and Delivery leadership to deliver business value through technology inside a Lean/Agile culture and delivery framework
- Understand and utilize knowledge around the challenges faced by LeafLink’s engineering team in order to make informed technology decisions and architectural approaches when implementing new functionality
- Take a hands-on approach to prototyping concepts and rolling out new infrastructure and concepts
- Interview and contribute to the growth of the engineering team, focusing on finding and then retaining candidates that will continue to elevate and diversify our ever-expanding set of in-house engineering talent
- Oversee and contribute meaningfully to various projects and initiatives within the department, helping to mentor and grow the technical competencies of the team through architectural reviews and pair programming efforts
- Help cultivate and advance a collaborative culture that values ownership and finding the best solution to a given problem while also emphasizing the importance of testing and automation
- Set and drive process and architectural standards that reflect the unique complexities of LeafLink’s business model while also complementing existing and ongoing work within other areas of the department
- Advocate for and deliver well-balanced solutions to technical issues as they arise based on a constantly-evolving product roadmap
- Keep up to date on modern technologies and trends and advocate for their inclusion within products when it makes sense as well as educating colleagues on practical use cases.
Qualifications:
- Established track record of technical leadership and architecture experience in professional environments that have complex business requirements, compliance, or scaling challenges; experience working in e-commerce is highly desirable
- Strong understanding of modern cloud-based architecture design patterns, operations, and cost models and the ability to be hands-on when implementing best practices or suggesting improvements
- Ability to advocate for competitive and innovative technical decisions, gather consensus and buy-in, and deliver commitments
- Experience working in service-oriented, API-driven application tech stacks and working knowledge of the challenges and gotchas that can bring to the SDLC
- Experience architecting, building, and iterating on highly-performant APIs and supplemental applications in event-driven distributed systems
- Experience working within environments that rely heavily on automation, CI, and CD concepts to rapidly deliver, measure, and iterate on products and features
- Experience within containerized, serverless, and event-driven infrastructure, Kubernetes, document databases, and AWS
- Exceptional critical thinking and analytical skills, possessing the ability to quickly understand and ideate on complex systems and their associated data
- Passionate about product-focused, data-driven decision-making and continuous iteration
- Experience communicating estimations and project visibility to senior management and stakeholders
- AWS certifications are an additional advantage
- Experience working within e-commerce, B2B, and their ancillary systems as well as their mobile counterparts
- An active member of the open-source and New York tech community a plus
- An interest in the cannabis industry and / or the LeafLink brand
Benefits:
- Flexible PTO to give our employees a little extra R&R when they need it
- Competitive compensation and 401k
- Comprehensive health coverage (medical, dental, vision) plus flexible spending accounts (FSA)
- A robust stock option plan to give our employees a direct stake in LeafLink’s success
- Generous referral bonuses because we believe no one can spot great talent better than our own team
LeafLink’s employee-centric culture has earned us a coveted spot on BuiltInNYC’s Best Places to Work list.