Architect - End to End Systems

About KATIM

KATIM is a leader in the development of innovative secure communication products and solutions for governments and businesses. As part of the Space & Cyber Technologies cluster at EDGE, one of the world’s leading advanced technology groups, KATIM delivers trust in a world where cyber risks are a constant threat, and fulfils the increasing demand for advanced cyber capabilities by delivering robust, secure, end-to-end solutions centered on four core business units: Networks, Ultra Secure Mobile Devices, Applications, and Satellite Communications. Our talented team of cross functional experts continually takes-on new challenges. We work with the energy of a start-up yet the discipline of a large business to make solutions and products work for our customers at scale.

We are looking for an End-to-End Systems Architect covering cross-domain disciplines in Business, Software.

Key Traits and Competencies:

• Strong Holistic Perspective: Focused on customer satisfaction and time-to-market efficiency.
• Deep-Dive Ability: Capable of analyzing and addressing specific business or technical needs.
• Cybersecurity Expertise: Committed to staying updated on both threat and mitigation developments.
• Cloud-Native Solutions: Knowledgeable in best practices for cloud-native architectures.
• Architectural Expertise: Proficient in product, solution, and enterprise architecture, as well as design across software.
• Agile Development Practices: Skilled in modern development practices, including agility, process optimization, quality assurance, and lifecycle management.

Strong Holistic Perspective

The ideal candidate will have a comprehensive understanding of products, from their use in the hands of the customer down to the intricacies of software architecture patterns and information flow.

New or modified needs and features are typically driven by software development and information flow patterns, which in turn impose requirements on hardware. Hardware architecture, which evolves more slowly, must focus on delivering the necessary capabilities and operating within physical constraints to meet software and information requirements. The foundation for rapid product evolution is generic, extendable, and upgradable hardware. The candidate has true cross-domain expertise on developing complex products and scalable services against market requirements.

Time-to-market (the time until a customer can start using a new product or feature) is the most critical metric for success. This metric must be supported by every part of the organization, including sales, product management, software development and support functions. Each new product or feature should not only expand the portfolio but also accelerate evolution and delivery by enhancing our tools, core architecture, and ways of working. The perfect candidate has sufficient understanding of all these organizational domains and fluently communicate with the stakeholders to find the best fit but most importantly can make sure all are delivering their input on time and with sense of urgency to the development.

Ability to Deep-Dive into Specific Business or Technical Needs

Architectural patterns are built on a foundation of theory and experience. These patterns become actionable when demonstrated with running code on the appropriate hardware, showing how they should be implemented in our solutions. This role involves driving this evolution in collaboration with the relevant teams.

Demonstrating new products and features on the correct hardware and supported by appropriate quality assurance tools is crucial for breaking down silos and disseminating knowledge across the organization. Acceleration and evolution in this role will only be effective if they are applied broadly, not locally. The candidate demonstrates his skills understanding the detailed domain needs and how to apply them in the architecture development.

Hands-On Leadership

This role requires a hands-on approach to design and development. The ideal candidate will not only architect solutions and systems but also actively participate in the creation of proof-of-concept implementations that can be leveraged in development. These prototypes will serve as practical demonstrations of architectural patterns and best practices, guiding the development teams in the correct implementation of these solutions.

Furthermore, the candidate must be capable of coaching and training others, ensuring that the development teams acquire the necessary skills and adhere to best practices. This includes providing mentorship in both technical competencies and agile methodologies, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement across the organization.

Cybersecurity

A strong understanding of current threat landscapes and effective mitigation practices must be integrated into our architectural patterns and solutions.

Relevant knowledge areas include:

• Information security and associated standards.
• National security regulations (physical, personal, organizational, and technical) and compliance.
• Security models across all dimensions.
• Secure infrastructure and architecture.
• Zero Trust principles (beyond just the NIST/CISA variants).
• Secure by design principles.
• Secure communication, including symmetric/asymmetric cryptography and negotiation protocols.
• Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) and new asymmetric encryption solutions.
• Regulatory requirements such as critical infrastructure, healthcare standards, and GDPR compliance.

All architectural patterns must be capable of operating in an isolated (air-gapped) environment without external communication, if required. Therefore, while a solution may have different needs, reusable patterns, services, and components must generally not rely on external communication.

Product/Solution/Enterprise Architecture and Solution/Software Design

The candidate must understand architectures, capabilities, and design at a logical and usage level and be able to discuss different solutions from a holistic perspective, aligned with the organization’s goals.

A deep understanding of software from various perspectives is also essential, including:

• The end user’s experience.
• The customer and their organization(s).
• The customer’s situation (including their stakeholders, market, etc.).
• External unavoidable parties (e.g., the internet, threat actors).
• Technical evolution, including:
  • AI (on-premises or isolated) for code generation and as part of products and solutions.
  • Cloud-native solutions and products.
  • High-availability and scalability, including:
    • Edge/Mist computing.
    • Horizontally scalable solutions.
    • Distributed logic or service with local execution and single-hop dependencies.
    • Asynchronous event-based information flow.
  • Data capture, flow, storage, and re-use (e.g., stream processing, Data-lake/Data-Warehouse).
  • Self-contained execution with serverless-like behavior.
  • Best practices in execution separation (e.g., processes, containerization, hypervisors).
  • Hardening (e.g., using languages like Go or Rust) and runtime environment requirements (e.g., OS/Kernel/Hypervisors).
  • CI/CD and tooling to accelerate evolution/development (which should not distract developers from their primary focus).
  • Automated testing, validation, and practical quality assurance.
  • Operations, support, and lifecycle management, including practical on-premises Kubernetes deployments.

Keywords:

C, C++, Go, Rust, CI/CD, Linux, Ethernet/IP (low and high-level networking), Android, Containers, Hypervisors, Daemons/Services, Cloud-native, Kubernetes (including operators, Helm, auto-scaling), Event Streaming, Event Stores, CloudEvents, Agile development (real agile), UML, SCRUM, PQC (including a high-level understanding of the new Crystals algorithms), Crypto-agility, Red/Black separation, Common Criteria validation, Secure infrastructure, Zero Trust, Data-warehouse, Data-lake, Parquet.

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