About Ancestry:

When you join Ancestry, you join a human-centered company where every person’s story is important. We believe that by discovering the struggles and triumphs of our past, we can foster deeper bonds and more meaningful connections among families and communities. Our talented team of scientists, engineers, genealogists, historians, and storytellers is dedicated to empowering customers around the world from all backgrounds on their journeys of personal discovery. 

With more than 30+ billion digitized global historical records, 100+ million family trees, and 20+ million people in our growing AncestryDNA database, Ancestry helps customers discover their family story and gain a new level of understanding about their lives. Passionate about dedicating your work to enriching people’s lives? You belong at Ancestry.

We are seeking a technical architect to become a part of the architecture team at Ancestry.  You will take on a role within our DNA business domain in giving technical guidance to many teams, ensuring we are aligned.  We have a technical stack that consists of Java, web services, AWS, node/nodejs, Angular, react, and various front-end technologies, along with many databases from relational, and NoSQL (key-value, columnar, etc), as well as big data, and ML, and caching solutions.

The successful candidate will have some proven experience with architecting and guiding development against web-scale cloud deployments (we use AWS) in a modern tech stack leveraging and seeking best-of-breed architectural solutions.

We are seeking a candidate who is good with communication and with influencing developers and cross functional teams in the right strategies and best practices for architecting.  Part of your role will be to document along with architectural designs and best practices for project specific team implementations.

What you will do:

• Provide the technical direction for DNA product line.
• Work closely with product managers and external partners to understand the requirements and propose architecture that would meet the architectural goals.
• Work closely with scrum teams to help them build solutions that take best advantage of technologies in Ancestry (and AWS) while following required governance processes.
• Work with architects in Ancestry to drive architectural best practices.
• Stay up to date with cloud industry technologies and best practices.
• Mentor software engineers and technical leads in the organization.
• Participate in code reviews and provide guidance.
• Provide guidance on code quality including testing best practices.
• Pair programming with teams as needed.
• Coding with teams when to assist teams when integrating new technologies as needed.

What you have:

• Bachelor’s degree in computer science or equivalent combination of education/experience.
• 10 years of experience designing and building large-scale, highly available software systems application stacks such as Node.js, React and React Native.
• 5 years of hands-on experience with front end development experience with modern web.
• 5 years of hands-on experience with Java.
• Deep knowledge of relational databases including MySQL or Postgres.
• Strong understanding of NoSQL databases.
• Expertise in authoring, reviewing, and presenting technical documentation including technical requirements documents, architecture diagrams, and sequence/flow diagrams.
• Proficiency in software design and in mentoring and reviewing the designs and code of others.
• Demonstrated communication skills and ability to clearly explain the business consequences of software design decisions and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Ability to work closely and collaboratively with engineering managers, product managers, and engineers to collectively drive towards the optimal solutions for Ancestry.

Additional Information:

Ancestry is an Equal Opportunity Employer that makes employment decisions without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, sex, pregnancy, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, age, mental or physical disability, medical condition, military or veteran status, citizenship, marital status, genetic information, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. In addition, Ancestry will provide reasonable accommodations for qualified individuals with disabilities.

All job offers are contingent on a background check screen that complies with applicable law.  For San Francisco office candidates, pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, Ancestry will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.  

Ancestry is not accepting unsolicited assistance from search firms for this employment opportunity. All resumes submitted by search firms to any employee at Ancestry via-email, the Internet or in any form and/or method without a valid written search agreement in place for this position will be deemed the sole property of Ancestry. No fee will be paid in the event the candidate is hired by Ancestry as a result of the referral or through other means.