System Software Architect

Are you passionate about co-creating the digital solution that can help tackle tomorrow’s sustainability and environmental challenges? Would you love to join a multi-disciplinary and talented team? Then you might be the System Software Architect we are looking for!

As a high-tech research centre that is partially, publicly funded, imec carries a responsibility to ensure global as well as local impact. imec’s EDiT (Enabling Digital Transformations) department plays a prominent role in realising societal & economical impact by conducting demand-driven R&D, in collaboration with authorities, other imec divisions, (academic) research institutes, companies, and citizens’ organisations. Our mission is to focus on the most complex challenges (‘wicked problems’) in 3 key domains: Sustainable & Urban Environments, Mobility & Logistics and Health. We are guided by an “Open for Impact” vision, which puts an emphasis on sharing all that we learn as open knowledge, open source, and open data. Read more about our activities on https://www.imec.be/nl .

EDiT Sustainable & Urban Environments (SUE)

You will join EDiT’s Sustainable & Urban Environments or ‘SUE’ cluster, a multi-disciplinary team of domain experts, developers, architects, innovation experts and project managers, collaborating on projects that aim to support the public sector with research into digital instruments to meet their sustainability and climate goals, and to make urban environments a better and healthier living environment.

We are focusing on specific complex challenges like climate neutrality (CO2 footprint), climate change impacts (flooding, heatstress, water scarcity,...) and circular economy (impact on sustainability) in the public sector. It starts with creating awareness about the current situation in urban environments, and more and more insights will come from data in the coming years. We want to unlock the value of this data to provide the necessary insights, and make better data-driven decisions about the measures to be taken and their effects. We are already looking into technologies like Data spaces (https://www.imec.be/nl/articles/data-mogen-niet-het-nieuwe-goud-zijn ) to enable better data sharing & Local Digital Twins (https://www.imeccityofthings.be/nl/projecten/digital-twin ) to support this.

Relevant projects to illustrate the current focus of the SUE cluster:

As a software system architect, your job is to integrate information (data), technical and security architectural elements into usable and durable software systems that support our running projects, but also put the foundations for evolving software instantiations in the projects of the future. In this role, it is crucial to pick and define the right system-module evolutions (expressed in sound roadmaps) that address the important system properties (e.g. interoperability) and cross-cutting concerns (e.g. security, privacy), tailored to the needs of today and tomorrow.

You plan the architecture for the systems and projects that you are responsible for, actively working together with the Solution and Enterprise architects of EDiT and the project manager. You are active on a daily basis in the development team, and you work together with the other architects in the cluster and EDiT. Among the architects, you have the most intimate relation with the development team and thus you actively support the implementation of the architectures you designed and advise the team in software development best practices, high quality delivery through testing and continuous improvement by supporting operational excellence initiatives such as further automation of the CI/CD pipeline together with the DevOps team.

You will be accountable for the overall successful behavior of the system in its intended environment (within the specific projects in the cluster that you operate in) and are an expert in defining non-functional requirements and mapping them to the functional ones. You also consider non-technical elements in your design decisions (like expertise of the team, existing solution roadmaps, knowledge barriers, external dependencies, budget, ...). You have a knack for de-risking important technical and technological choices and communicating clearly about this.