Principal Architect – Secure Platforms Full Time

Help Shape the Future of Secure Computing

At Becrypt, we build secure platform technologies used in some of the UK’s most demanding environments across defence, government and critical national infrastructure.

We are looking for a Principal Architect to help shape the technical direction of our secure platform portfolio, spanning our hardened Linux endpoints and Cross Domain solutions.

This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who enjoys getting into the detail of complex systems, but can also step back and make the architectural decisions that shape products over the longer term.

You won’t be managing a large team. Instead, you’ll influence through technical credibility, judgement and collaboration – working closely with engineering, product, security and customer-facing teams to solve difficult problems and make sure we build the right things in the right way.

The Role

As Principal Architect, you’ll provide architectural leadership across multiple secure product lines.

You’ll work closely with the CTO, engineering leads and product management to:

• Shape the architecture and technical direction of new products and major initiatives;
• Make complex architectural decisions and help teams navigate technical trade-offs;
• Ensure security, assurance and maintainability are considered from the outset;
• Provide architectural input into challenging customer deployments and integrations;
• Identify opportunities for shared platforms, services and tooling across our products;
• Act as a technical escalation point for complex engineering and customer issues; and
• Develop architectural capability across our senior engineering community.

The role has a strong practical element. We are looking for someone who is comfortable going beyond architecture diagrams – understanding how systems actually work, challenging assumptions, investigating problems and working with engineers to get to the right answer.

What You’ll Bring

We’re looking for someone who has operated successfully at Principal, Staff Engineer, Lead Architect or equivalent level in a technically complex environment.

You don’t need to have worked across every technology listed below. We are particularly interested in people who have deep expertise in systems and security, combined with sufficient breadth to work across complex enterprise environments.

You are likely to bring strong experience in several of the following:

• Systems and operating systems: strong understanding of operating system architecture, systems engineering and platform security, ideally with significant Linux experience.
• Security architecture: threat modelling, security boundaries, attack surfaces, hardening and secure-by-design principles.
• Networking: TCP/IP, DNS, routing, segmentation, firewalls, TLS, VPNs and secure communications.
• Identity and trust: PKI, certificates, authentication, identity and directory services.
• Enterprise infrastructure: experience working with complex Microsoft and/or Linux/open-source environments.
• Virtualisation and isolation: understanding of virtualisation architectures and their use for security, isolation and separation.
• Architecture leadership: experience making and communicating architectural decisions across multiple teams or products.
• Technical communication: the ability to explain complex technical issues clearly to engineers, customers and senior stakeholders.
• Most importantly, you’ll have strong architectural judgement. You’ll be comfortable making decisions where there isn’t an obvious answer, balancing security, engineering effort, customer requirements and long-term product strategy.

Particularly Useful – But Not Essential

Experience in any of the following would be valuable:

• Cross Domain Solutions, Guards or data diodes;
• High-assurance or security-critical systems;
• Common Criteria, NIAP, NCSC guidance or similar assurance frameworks;
• Secure boot, TPM, measured boot and hardware roots of trust;
• VDI, thin-client or remote-access architectures;
• Separation kernels or microkernel architectures;
• Formal verification or security assurance cases;
• Product accreditation, independent evaluation or red-team activity; and
• Open-source operating systems and upstream contribution.

You don’t need to have all of these. Experience in a high-assurance security environment is valuable, but we’re equally interested in exceptional architects from adjacent technical disciplines who can bring the right systems and security expertise.

What You’ll Do

Set architectural direction

• Define and maintain reference architectures, principles and design patterns.
• Provide architectural leadership for significant product initiatives.
• Assess new product ideas and customer requirements from technical, security and delivery perspectives.
• Identify opportunities for common platforms, services and tooling.

Lead security architecture

• Lead or contribute to threat modelling and architectural risk assessments.
• Set and promote good practice around system hardening, trust, PKI, cryptography and network security.
• Ensure security and assurance requirements are built into designs from the beginning.
• Contribute to secure development, software supply-chain security and vulnerability response.

Work with customers and delivery teams

• Provide technical leadership on complex customer deployments and integrations.
• Support pre-sales, bids and solution development where architectural input is required.
• Help engineering teams resolve difficult architectural and technical problems.
• Communicate complex technical decisions clearly to customers, partners and senior stakeholders.

Develop people and capability

• Mentor senior and principal engineers.
• Help improve architectural practices across the engineering organisation.
• Encourage good technical debate and evidence-based decision making.
• Act as a trusted technical sounding board for engineering and product leadership.

What Success Looks Like

First 3 months

• You’ll have developed a strong understanding of our products, architectures, customers and threat models, built relationships across engineering and product, and identified the most important architectural risks and opportunities.

Within 6 months

• You’ll be leading architectural work on significant product initiatives or customer programmes and will have become a trusted escalation point for complex technical decisions.

Within 12 months

• You’ll be helping shape a clear architectural direction across the portfolio, reducing technical risk and rework, and increasing architectural capability across the engineering organisation.

The Kind of Person Who Will Thrive Here

You’ll probably enjoy this role if you:

• Like understanding how things work rather than just how they are supposed to work;
• Enjoy solving difficult technical problems with other experienced engineers;
• Are comfortable challenging established thinking while remaining open to being challenged yourself;
• Can move comfortably between low-level technical detail and wider business or customer considerations;
• Care about security and assurance without losing sight of usability and delivery;
• Take ownership of problems and see them through to resolution; and
• Enjoy developing the people around you.

Why Becrypt?

This is an opportunity to work on technology where security really matters.

Our products operate in environments where conventional approaches aren’t always sufficient, and where architectural decisions can have significant implications for security, assurance and operational effectiveness.

You’ll have the opportunity to influence the direction of a specialist technology portfolio, work alongside highly experienced engineers and architects, and solve problems that are genuinely challenging.

Package & discretionary benefits:

• 25 days annual leave plus an additional 2 days after 2 years’ service
• 5 days additional holiday purchase available
• Private medical insurance
• Heath cashback plan with Healthshield
• Pension scheme
• Life cover 4 x salary
• Season ticket loan
• Salary exchange benefits (ride2work, pension)
• Subsidised gym membership
• Employee referral scheme
   

Role will be subject to an employment screening process and will require security clearance.

Tagged as: architect, cross domain solutions, cybersecurity. cyber security, linux, security architecture, VDI