Job offer

We are IceWarp. For 25+ years, we've been building a communication and collaboration platform that tens of millions of people open every morning. We've been cheerfully poking Google and Microsoft in the ribs the whole time, and honestly? It's been fun.

Now, the global collaboration market is experiencing massive growth, and we are accelerating to capture a much larger piece of it. To do that, our foundational technology needs a leader.

The Challenge & The Opportunity:
Let’s be radically honest: 25 years of a successful product means 25 years of accumulated engineering decisions. We carry heavy technical debt. We aren't hiding from it. We are looking for the person who sees it as a career-defining puzzle.

Our leadership team is increasingly focused on business strategy, scaling, and customers. What we need is someone to take absolute ownership of the platform's technical depth. Whether the right path forward is a systematic untangling of the past or a calculated, strategic rewrite. That will be your call to make based on evidence. We need a brilliant technical mind to clear the path, architect a highly scalable future, and push our engineering excellence to the absolute next level.

What You Will Own:

The Modernization Strategy: You lead the charge in conquering our technical debt while the product keeps shipping. You dictate the sequence, the stack, and the approach, whether that means evolving what's there or building anew.
Full-Spectrum Architecture: You oversee the entire board. Backend first and foremost, but also frontend, mobile, and infrastructure/DevOps. You understand what’s happening in all of them and how the pieces fit.
Raising the Engineering Bar: You elevate our engineering standards. Not by micro-managing every commit, but by challenging designs, setting clear quality bars, and building an environment where great engineers thrive and want to do their best work.
Strategic Innovation: You push new technologies into the platform because they solve real scalability problems and give us a competitive edge, not just because they are shiny.

What Success Looks Like:

No micromanaged KPIs. But you should know what good looks like here.

Technical debt going down. Visibly, steadily, without stopping the roadmap.
New technologies landing with a concept behind them and surviving contact with production.
Architecture decisions that hold up six months later.
First 3-6 Months Expectations: Assess the legacy state, provide technical leadership and guidance, establish the overarching technical direction, and define the roadmap that guides the company on the right path forward.
Teams shipping faster because the platform fights them less.

Who You Are:
If two or more of these don’t land, this probably isn’t the right fit. Better to know now.

You take ownership. You see a systemic problem, you take it on. No waiting for a mandate.
You think in trade-offs, not trends. “I want this platform to last another twenty-five years” beats “I want to use the newest stack” every time.
You disagree well. You push back hard when you see it differently, and you do it without drama. Then you commit to the call.
You take feedback like a professional. Challenged in front of others, proven wrong by data, outvoted? You stay curious, not defensive.
You default to async. Write it down. Document the why. Public channel over DM, so decisions outlive the meeting.
You speak Czech or Slovak plus English. Day to day, the team runs in Czech and Slovak. Docs and technical writing live in English. You’re comfortable in both worlds.

Where You Spike:
This is an ultra-senior individual contributor role. We’re hiring for a specific and rare shape.

Backend Mastery & Broad Range: You have designed and shipped complex backend systems, but you also genuinely understand frontend, mobile, and DevOps. Enough to spot the second-order effects and call out a decision that helps one area while quietly hurting another.
Battle-Tested Architect: As a CTO, principal engineer, or chief architect, the title matters less than the scars. You’ve made technology bets, lived with the consequences, and learned from both.
Strong Object-Oriented Design: Parts of our platform run on Delphi/Pascal. You won't be writing it, but you will be architecting its modern successors. You need to read it and understand it to plan the transition.
Technical Leadership & Influence: You command strong technical authority and lead real engineering change through deep expertise. You drive alignment across teams by setting architectural standards, building proof-of-concept prototypes, and establishing Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) that bring consensus through clear reasoning and proven technical direction.
Practical AI Integration: You enable and drive AI integration across the entire engineering team, establishing best practices, tooling, and workflows for AI-assisted development, code comprehension, legacy refactoring, and automated testing while ensuring overall system safety and design integrity.
Grace Under Pressure: Big expectations, big visibility, decisions with real consequences. You need a cool head and a long game.

What We Are Not Asking For:

Not a people-management role. Nobody reports to you. Your authority is your expertise, which, frankly, is the harder kind to carry.
Not a Delphi/Pascal expert. You need to read and understand it, not write it. Solid OOP thinking is what matters.
Not a business role. Conferences, customer meetings, sales support, etc., are handled by the leadership team. Yours is the technology. That’s the whole point of this position.
Not a consultant. We don’t need a slide deck about our architecture. We need someone who stays, decides, and lives with the consequences.

What We Offer:
We're a Czech company challenging giants 100x our size. We can't match Big Tech packages, but this role is paid to reflect what it carries. We'll share the salary range in our very first video call. Here's what else we offer:

A rare technical mandate: Shape the architecture of a product used by tens of millions, with leadership's ear and no committee in between.
A genuinely hard, genuinely interesting problem: Untangle heavy debt and modernize a 25 year old platform that competes with Google and Microsoft, while it keeps running.
Freedom to bring new ideas and ship them right now.
Hybrid: at least 2 days/week in-office, flexible hours.
Office in Karlín, directly at Křižíkova metro station.
20 days of vacation (+4 via KPI System) and 5 Personal days.
Daily snacks and office-paid lunches twice a week.

Chief Software Architect

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