At The Toro Company's corporate headquarters in Bloomington, Minnesota we pride ourselves in being an industry leader for outdoor environment products. These markets include turf and landscape maintenance, snow and ice management, underground utility, specialty construction, and irrigation and outdoor lighting solutions. Our teams at this location take pride in being on cutting edge of creating innovative products while partnering with world-class employees that bring passion to their everyday work. This is a location that truly values its employees with upward career mobility and advancement opportunities.

We invite you to become part of our team!

Position Description

Job Purpose:

The embedded software architect (ESA) is responsible for planning, defining, designing, and documenting parts of the embedded software hierarchy that require a software systems focus. Depending on team resources, the ESA may also implement designs into functioning software modules for inclusion into product embedded software.

This position will focus on software-related challenges that exhibit one or more of the following characteristics:

The functional software is shared among several or all product teams A complex software design that if left to a single project team to define, is likely to work on only one product and does not transfer effectively to other products Software design work that greatly affects a long-term roadmap

Job Duties & Responsibilities:

• Influence embedded software strategic direction and design at Toro.
• Demonstrate the ability to translate business needs into solution architecture requirements and understands the long-term and short-term perspectives of embedded software investment.
• Work closely with stakeholders from various lines of business to develop architecture blueprints and realistic roadmaps.
• Provide thought leadership of emerging technologies, standards, innovations and industry trends
• Analyze the current embedded software architecture to identify weaknesses and develop opportunities for improvement.
• Consider how to effectively transition the product and software development team from legacy design to next generation designs.
• Arbitrate software system conflicts or shortcomings in existing or future embedded designs between all stakeholders.
• Properly document designs and software architectural frameworks.
• Acts as the owner and keeper of said documentation.
• Use appropriate tools to manage changes and improvements to the architecture documentation library.
• Consider broader company software architectures or enterprise-level architectures as well as software business goals, and collaboratively partners with other teams to create embedded designs that will satisfy the broader needs.
• Consider other industry standards related to embedded software work at Toro such as communication or safety-related standards and implements strategies with these external standards in mind.
• Work within the limitation of the Toro machine controller and electrical architecture to provide practical, efficient design solutions.

Job Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or an ABET accredited Electrical, Mechanical, Aeronautical or Agricultural Engineering program with comparable computing experience, or
• Masters Degree in a relevant computing field.
• Professional Engineering license and/or successful completion of EIT requirements is desirable.
• 8+ years of technology experience in areas such as embedded controls design and development, communication protocol design and application, multi-controller integration, middleware, database management or operations. Systems design, analysis, diagnostics and testing is desirable.
• 2+ years of experience in an architecture-based influential leadership role.
• Experience in C programming. Other languages such as C++, C#, XML, Python, Java, etc. are desirable.
• Experience working with IDEs and configuration managements tools such as SVN and JIRA.
• Proven ability to develop detailed solution designs. Understands architecture constructs and patterns, serial protocols such as CAN J1939, development methodologies (Agile, Waterfall, etc.).
• Proven broad analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Self-starter who thrives in an ever-changing, fast-paced business environment.
• Excellent project management, organizational and planning skills.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and conceptual skills.
• Ability to handle multiple concurrent projects, requests and multiple priorities while meeting implementation and daily turnaround deadlines.
• Strong interpersonal skills and the ability to work well on cross-functional project teams.
• Other Job-Related Components: (e.g., Physical demands, working conditions, travel)