Solutions Architect - Professional Services Team (Europe Remote)

Job Description

Who is Element?

Element is the startup which employs the core team behind matrix.org— the leading project for secure, open decentralised communication.

Matrix’s mission is to make messaging as open as email— allowing everyone to choose where their data is hosted, enjoy private conversations thanks to advanced encryption, and ultimately be in control of their own communication.

Matrix powers our flagship messaging apps for the web, iOS & Android, along with EMS, our SaaS platform for personal & professional use.

We build things for everyone, and we know we can’t succeed without a diverse team. Our hiring process is designed to be humane and give candidates the best chance to show us what you can do. If we ever fall down on this, please let us know.

The Role

You’ll work as part of a small, distributed team of Matrix and Element experts, bringing new customers on board and helping them realise the benefits of Open Source decentralized messaging within their business.

You will drive communication both externally with our customers, and internally within Element. You’ll collaborate with our largest customers to design solutions that meet their needs, and you’ll represent customer requirements internally, helping to steer product feature development across the delivery teams within Element.

Responsibilities

You’ll be joining a small-but-growing team. Individual team members’ experience of the role varies over time and depending on experience, expertise and interests, but you can expect to be involved in most of the customer-facing aspects of technical project delivery:

• Solutions Design - requirements gathering; designing a solution from the available components (Open Source and proprietary); driving effort estimation; assembling quotes
• Product Design - designing product enhancements for sponsored development projects
• Project Management - managing delivery of multi-month projects; managing dedicated Professional Services developers and negotiating the use of shared company resources

Projects

You’ll help customers build solutions based on Element (the flagship Matrix client for iOS, Android, web and desktop) and Synapse, our reference implementation Matrix Homeserver.

On top of the base solution, you can expect to:

• Scope and coordinate installation of on-prem solutions
• Scope, design and coordinate delivery of sponsored development projects (usually items from our publicly available roadmap, reprioritised to meet a particular client need)

Since the majority of any solution is Open Source you can get a great feel for our technology by trying it out for yourself. And since most of our development occurs in the open you can see what we’re like to work with - joining a dev-centric Matrix room such as #element-dev:matrix.org provides a window into the core team and the community. Come and say hi!

Requirements

Who are you?

The most important thing is that you believe passionately in the mission of decentralisation of the internet. More specifically that you believe that communications should not be centralised in the hands of a small number of very large organisations and instead individuals should control their own data and choose who they share it with.

Additionally we are looking for someone who is:

• smart, curious and enthusiastic
• passionate about working with customers to deliver software people love
• pragmatic, with a bias towards maintaining code quality (understanding that trade-offs in the short term require balance in the long term)
• empathetic, with their colleagues, our customers, and end users

Your experience and qualifications

• Experience in a customer-facing technical role
• Experience delivering large software projects with complex requirements
• Desirable: experience of working on an Open Source software project
• Desirable: experience coordinating installation of on-prem software solutions
• Desirable: fluency in multiple languages: German and French are particularly valuable

Domain-specific experience

Our customers come from a broad range of business domains - experience in any vertical will be valued, but right now we would particularly value expertise in:

• Healthcare
• Education
• Defense

If you have any questions before making an application reach out to Tom (@tom:lant.uk) via https://app.element.io

Benefits

Our general approach is to treat people like adults and acknowledge that by being flexible we create an environment for people to do their best work. For more details here is our manifesto.

That said specific points that differentiate us.

• Work (almost) full time on FOSS projects with high visibility and a large enthusiastic community
• The chance to work with large scale governmental installations through to high profile FOSS projects such as Mozilla or KDE.
• Option to work partially or fully remote (our head office is in London), we offer flexibility and consider ourselves to be a family friendly environment.
• People tend to stay with the company for a long time, we take this as a sign that we have a cohesive supportive culture, that we have engaging challenging work and that people can develop their skills and careers here for the long term.

Element does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, colour, religion, age, national origin, marital status, disability, veteran status, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity or any other reason prohibited by law in provision of employment opportunities and benefits.