Software Architect

About Nearfield Instruments

Nearfield Instruments (NFI) is a fast-growing scale-up high-tech company. We design, develop, integrate, market and service advanced metrology machines. Our machines enable our customers - the world’s leading chipmakers – to increase the production yields, and thus, functionality of their microchips, which in turn leads to smaller, more powerful consumer electronics.

Where you will be working?

Within our Design & Engineering department this role is part of the Software Group. The SW Group consists of roughly 40 engineers within several teams working on the areas of Machine Control, Device Control, Integration and Data Science. Our technology stack is based on C# and Python but our true passion lies making customer solutions. Here are the different aspects of our stack:

Machine Control: business logic, UI and semiconductor-foundry communication logic of our machines, giving commands to device control.

Device Control: governing the motion and measurement aspects of our machine in close collaboration with mechatronics engineers in cross disciplinary teams.

Data Science: Converting signals into images into KPI’s for our customers.

Integration: Making sure individually tested components work together and with our machine.

Further, there are cross-cutting concerns of customer integrations, cybersecurity, computation, requirement gathering and AI where architects play a crucial role.

What will you be doing?

You will take a responsible for the architecture, design, and lifecycle management of one of the aspects above, while taking the lead in one of the cross-cutting concerns. At the same time, you will have a deep understanding of our domain, our machine and use this to perform requirement-analysis and come up with MVP-proposal so that we can truly be agile.

Your responsibilities include:

• Collecting requirements from (Internal) Customers and translate product requirements to SW level requirements for large projects

• Making a high-level architecture and design to fulfill both SW level requirements and product requirements

• Leading the development of multiple features along with a handful of other developers

• Troubleshooting technical issues that involve software development, engineering tasks and product releases

• Driving software quality and reliability through structured testing strategies, validation, and continuous improvement

• Proactively identifying system-level risks and resolving complex technical issues

• Leading and supporting the integration of multi-disciplinary subsystems

• Acting as a mentor and escalation point for senior software engineers

While software architecture is mostly a post-developer role, you are expected to stay hands-on and enjoy locking yourself in and turning your brilliant ideas in to production code. That said, we don’t care what language you have developed in as long as its modern.

Why is this position interesting for you?

• You take ownership of complex technical systems and make architectural decisions

• You are recognized as a subject matter expert within the organization

• You work on high-performance mechatronic systems using advanced technologies

• You operate in an environment where engineering excellence and autonomy are value

As a scaleup, we can provide phenomenal learning and development opportunities but can also be a hectic environment at times. You should understand agile quite well. You embrace the culture and keep working on following aspects such as customer collaboration, Individuals and interaction, responding to change over following a structured plan, prototyping/working solutions over comprehensive documentation.

• Education: Master’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Physics or Electronics

• Above 10 years of experience in software development

• Above 7 years of experience in software architecture and design

• Experience with modern software development practices, languages and tools (git, CI/CD, automated testing, JIRA, C#, Python, PlantUML and use of LLMs)

• Outstanding communication skills: You can describe a complex technical topic in 2 sentences to a non-software person

• Above 7 years of experience with precision equipment or semiconductor industry

• Coaching ability, as a technical advisor, you make sure that the team stays up-to-date with relevant knowledge

• Ability to influence other lead engineers, managers and teams in the organization and convince them of your technical vision and direction