At the European Patent Office (EPO) we are undertaking a major transformation aimed at building a DevOps practice, making agile principles a reality in our daily work, adopting green technologies and utilising artificial intelligence. Our mission is to support innovation, competitiveness and economic growth across Europe. We pride ourselves on taking innovation seriously, and are fully committed to achieving our digital transformation.

The European Patent Office's Strategic Plan 2028 (SP2028) emphasises a commitment to sustainability, focusing on engaging and empowering its workforce through innovative HR practices. This strategy aims to attract and develop talent, support mobility and flexibility, provide engaging workspaces and ensure the EPO remains a leading institution in the intellectual property landscape.

The Engineering and Architecture team are responsible for ensuring the EPO's IT roadmap is correctly executed and that standards, best practices and blueprints for modern application delivery patterns as well as cloud-native engineering and cloud-native operation practices are in place to deliver what is required under SP2028.

We are looking for highly motivated and experienced experts able to work independently and bring state-of-the-art knowledge of the respective domains to our Engineering and Architecture team. The role of front-end/web architect combines strategic technology vision with hands-on implementation skills within the front-end and web domain. As a front-end/web architect, you are fully at home in a cloud-native world and understand how to leverage these technologies as well as cloud platforms to benefit the front-end domain. Commitment to sharing knowledge and experience within the team, learning new technologies and contributing to our continuous transformation and development are key.

In anticipation of exciting future opportunities in different fields of IT in our organisation, we are launching a talent pool for Front-End/Web Architects.

With us you will

• design reference architectures and implementations
• be responsible for identifying strategic technologies and approaches that can help EPO front-end/web teams achieve their goals in support of SP2028
• co-ordinate such initiatives with senior IT management, implement proofs of concept, document reference architectures and implementations and work hands-on within product teams to bring initiatives to life
• ensure that subsequent product teams adopt these best practices and implement them successfully
• perform hands-on troubleshooting, i.e. when teams are facing front-end issues, you will join them and work hands-on to find the root causes of problems and assist in implementing solutions
• provide technical consultancy, support and guidance, i.e. provide technical advice within the front-end domain on topics such as performance, security, library choices, CI/CD, browser support, UI/UX implementation, EPO design system, software design and maintenance, and component choice
• assist in skill assessments for new front-end/web developers or architects
• undertake secondments to product teams, i.e. when the need arises, you may be seconded to work with one or more product teams pursuing strategic objectives or attempting first-of-a-kind implementations

Apply if you have

• state-of-the-art knowledge in the respective domain
• extensive and diverse consulting experience built through customer-facing implementations, migrations and rollouts
• good communication and presentation skills
• technical coaching skills
• analytical problem-solving skills
• an independent way of working
• the ability to multi-task and manage time and priorities across multiple projects and contexts
• flexibility as an innovative thought-leader
• at least five years' experience providing technical leadership to development teams
• "full life-cycle" experience with projects from inception to production and maintenance
• broad and up-to-date knowledge, experience and interest in front-end/web technologies as well as (public) cloud platforms, CI/CD and cloud-native security (OIDC)
• progressive delivery, API Management and ServiceMesh
• front-end observability, OpenTelemetry
• CSS, HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, Webpack, Redux, ViteJS
• cross-device support experience
• proven experience in performance engineering and optimisation
• experience working with and preferably on a (corporate) design system
• at least five years' proven experience with React and Typescript

Our minimum requirements for this post

• Diploma of completed studies at master's level or – in exceptional cases – equivalent professional experience
• Generally, an excellent knowledge (at least C1) of one official language (English, French and German) and ability to understand the other two; alternatively, excellent knowledge (at least C1) of at least one official language (in such cases, the willingness to learn the missing language(s) and to reach level B2 within a set time frame would be required)
• Citizenship of one of the member states of the European Patent Organisation

Process

Candidates are kindly asked to upload an updated CV and outline their motivation in the designated application field (character limit 4000). If so wished, the motivation letter can also be uploaded as a Word or pdf attachment under "Application document" in SuccessFactors. In this case, please indicate in the designated field "Please refer to attached motivation letter".

The successful candidate will be selected on the basis of qualifications, competencies, professional experience and language knowledge, supplemented as appropriate by interviews, tests and/or a personality questionnaire.

A reserve list may be constituted, should more candidates than required at this time be considered suitable following the selection procedure. Such reserve lists are valid for 18 months and reserve list candidates may be contacted, should a vacancy with substantially the same profile arise during that period.

More information on how we recruit can be found on our EPO jobs and careers site.

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Key information

Job group: 4

Grade: G7 to G10 (net (basic) monthly salary* for this vacancy: EUR 6 172 to 9 901 depending on experience and location) 

Duration of appointment: Five years, with the possibility of extension

Career path: Technical 

Location: Office-wide 

Application deadline: 11 March 2025

Interviews planned for: Second half of March 2025 - first half of April 2025

* after deduction of EPO-internal tax and before deduction of staff contributions to the social security and pension schemes.