Principal Architect – Secure Platforms in London

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 shape the technical direction of our secure platform portfolio, spanning 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 while making architectural decisions that shape products over the longer term. You won't be managing a large team; you'll influence through technical credibility, judgement and collaboration across engineering, product, security and customer-facing teams.

The Role

• 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.
• Define and maintain reference architectures, principles and design patterns.
• Provide architectural input into complex customer deployments and integrations.
• Identify opportunities for shared platforms, services and tooling.
• Act as a technical escalation point for complex engineering and customer issues.
• Develop architectural capability across our senior engineering community.

This is a practical role. You'll go beyond architecture diagrams to understand how systems actually work, challenge assumptions, investigate problems and work 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 experience across every technology below. We're particularly interested in deep systems and security expertise, with sufficient breadth to work across complex enterprise environments.

• Strong experience in several of the following:
• Systems and operating systems: OS 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 and directory services.
• Enterprise infrastructure: complex Microsoft and/or Linux/open-source environments.
• Virtualisation and isolation: virtualisation architectures used for security, isolation and separation.
• Architecture leadership: making and communicating architectural decisions across multiple teams or products.
• Technical communication: explaining complex issues clearly to engineers, customers and senior stakeholders.

Most importantly, you'll have strong architectural judgement, balancing security, engineering effort, customer requirements and long-term product strategy where there isn't an obvious answer.

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.
• Open-source operating systems and upstream contribution.

You don't need all of these. We're equally interested in exceptional architects from adjacent technical disciplines with the right systems and security expertise.

Additional Responsibilities

• You'll lead or contribute to threat modelling and architectural risk assessments, promoting good practice around system hardening, trust, PKI, cryptography and network security.
• You'll contribute to secure development, software supply-chain security and vulnerability response.
• You'll provide technical leadership on complex customer deployments, support pre-sales, bids and solution development where architectural input is required, and mentor senior and principal engineers.

What Success Looks Like

• First 3 months: Understand our products, architectures, customers and threat models, build relationships across engineering and product, and identify key architectural risks and opportunities.
• Within 6 months: Lead architectural work on significant product initiatives or customer programmes and become a trusted escalation point for complex technical decisions.
• Within 12 months: Help shape architectural direction across the portfolio, reducing technical risk and rework and increasing architectural capability.

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 architectural decisions can have significant implications for security, assurance and operational effectiveness. You'll influence a specialist technology portfolio, work alongside highly experienced engineers and architects, and solve genuinely challenging problems.

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
• Health cashback plan with Healthshield
• Pension scheme
• Life cover 4x 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.