Software Architect – 6-Month Contract (Full-time)

Duration: 6-Month Contract (Full-time engagement; highly extendable)

Work Arrangement: Remote (Strong preference for Vancouver, BC area; open to remote across North America with requirement to operate on Pacific Time with an 8:30 AM PST daily stand-up)

Advantages

- High‑Traffic Digital Commerce Impact: Architect backend search, browse, and catalog discovery platforms that power upper‑funnel experiences for millions of global digital consumers.
- Balanced Architecture & Engineering Scope: Enjoy a balanced role combining high‑level systems design and architectural governance with hands‑on coding and technical problem solving.
- Long‑Term Extension Potential: Secure a strategic initial 6‑month consulting assignment with strong multi‑term extension potential.
- Modern Cloud‑Native Tech Stack: Design natively on AWS utilizing OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, microservices, containerization, and modern observability tools.

Responsibilities

- Search Engine & Platform Architecture: Architect, design, and manage large‑scale search and catalog engines (OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, Lucene) supporting critical upper‑funnel digital commerce discovery flows.
- Hands‑on Design & Delivery (50/50): Balance architectural leadership and road‑mapping with hands‑on development, code reviews, and direct implementation alongside cross‑functional engineering pods.
- System Design Artifacts: Create detailed architectural blueprints, including logical, conceptual, and data integration diagrams adhering to enterprise architecture standards.
- Cross‑Functional Sprint Planning: Partner with product management and engineering leads to define technical roadmaps, sprint scope, QA strategies,



and production reliability metrics.
- DevOps & Platform Automation: Leverage Terraform, Jenkins, Git, and automated CI/CD pipelines to streamline deployment velocity, code quality gates, and cloud provisioning.
- Reliability & Production Escalation: Serve as the senior technical escalation point for critical production incidents, ensuring rapid recovery, conducting root‑cause analysis, and implementing resilient preventative controls.
- Global Team Alignment: Collaborate daily with distributed engineering teams across North America and offshore development centers, maintaining smooth operational cadence during core Pacific Time business hours.

Qualifications

- Professional IT Depth: 8+ years of progressive post‑baccalaureate experience in software engineering, technical systems design, and application architecture.
- Enterprise Search Engine Mastery: Hands‑on experience building, scaling, and managing enterprise search engines using OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or Lucene implementations.
- Cloud Platform Proficiency: Robust background in cloud‑native application architectures, natively deployed on AWS (or comparable enterprise cloud platforms such as Azure or GCP).
- Backend Development Skills: Hands‑on coding and systems design proficiency in backend languages such as Java, Go, or Python.
- Database & High Availability:



Demonstrated experience designing for 24/7 high availability using relational databases and NoSQL solutions (e.g., DynamoDB, Elasticsearch).
- DevOps & Infrastructure as Code: Working familiarity with CI/CD automation and tooling, including Terraform, Jenkins, Git, Splunk, and APM monitoring suites.
- Communication & Technical Leadership: Proven ability to lead architectural design reviews, present tradeoffs to leadership, and mentor engineering teams across complex technical domains.
- Schedule Alignment: Ability to align with Pacific Standard Time (PST) working hours, including daily 8:30 AM PST stand‑ups.

Summary

If you are a tech-savvy Software Architect or Staff/Principal Engineer who pairs 8+ years of software engineering depth with hands‑on OpenSearch/Elasticsearch engine mastery, modern AWS architecture expertise, and a balanced passion for systems design and code delivery, this 6‑month contract opportunity is an ideal next step. Bring your platform engineering precision, search architecture vision, and collaborative technical leadership to our client's team today

EEO & Accessibility Statement

Randstad Canada is committed to fostering a workforce reflective of all peoples of Canada. As a result, we are committed to developing and implementing strategies to increase the equity, diversity and inclusion within the workplace by examining our internal policies, practices, and systems throughout the entire lifecycle of our workforce, including its recruitment, retention and advancement for all employees. In addition to our deep commitment to respecting human rights, we are dedicated to positive actions to affect change to ensure everyone has full participation in the workforce free from

📌 Cloud Solution Architect (Vancouver)
🏢 Microsoft
📍 Vancouver