Lead Technical Architect – Permanent – London/hybrid - Ref: 26020

Our client is looking for an experienced Lead Technical Architect to join an exciting expanding team. The role is to own the architectural integrity and long-term technical evolution of a global SaaS platform. The Lead Technical Architect provides hands‐on technical leadership across engineering teams - driving clarity in how services interact, raising engineering standards, and ensuring architectural decisions support the platform's scalability, reliability, and AI‐enabled future. This is an active, leadership‐first role: the successful candidate proactively shapes direction rather than waiting to be directed.

Platform Architecture & Technical Direction

• Own and drive the architectural direction of a core global SaaS platform, proactively identifying and proposing improvements to scalability, resilience, and technical strategy.
• Define and maintain clarity in how services interact across the platform - including backend services, cloud infrastructure, data systems, Salesforce and CRM integrations, and real‐time telecoms components.
• Establish and maintain architectural documentation, decision records, and system diagrams, ensuring knowledge is accessible and shared across engineering teams.
• Lead architecture reviews and guide engineering teams in making sound technical decisions that balance delivery pace with long‐term platform health.
• Work closely with product and engineering leadership to ensure architectural decisions align with and actively enable the long‐term product strategy.

Engineering Leadership & Mentorship

• Act as the primary technical escalation point for complex platform challenges, architectural decisions, and cross‐team dependencies.
• Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, actively raising technical capability and establishing a culture of engineering excellence across the organisation.
• Champion strong engineering discipline, including design reviews, clear documentation, thoughtful system design, and proactive technical communication.
• Bring external best practice and a breadth of industry experience to bear - challenging current approaches where appropriate and introducing proven patterns that raise the bar for the wider team.

Platform Governance & Risk Reduction

• Identify and proactively mitigate architectural risks including undocumented systems, institutional knowledge dependencies, technical debt, and inconsistencies across the platform.
• Establish sustainable governance processes to ensure the platform evolves in a structured, maintainable, and secure way over time.
• Drive improvements to operational resilience, observability, monitoring, and incident response practices.
• Provide architectural oversight of the AWS environment, ensuring infrastructure is scalable, secure, observable, and cost‐efficient across regions.
• Collaborate with DevOps and platform engineers to continuously improve infrastructure practices, tooling, and delivery pipelines.

AI Capabilities

• Lead the architectural design and evolution of AI‐enabled capabilities across the platform, including how AI models, pipelines, and services are integrated into the broader system.
• Evaluate, select, and guide the implementation of AI and ML frameworks, tools, and infrastructure patterns appropriate for a global, multi‐tenant SaaS environment.
• Ensure AI systems are designed for reliability, scalability, observability, and responsible use - embedding good AI engineering practice from the ground up.
• Stay actively informed about the rapidly evolving AI landscape, including new architectures, tooling, and patterns relevant to our client's platform and use cases.
• Apply deep research and hands‐on prototyping to assess emerging AI technologies, translating findings into concrete architectural recommendations for engineering and leadership teams.
• Clearly communicate AI architectural decisions, trade‐offs, and risks to both technical and non‐technical stakeholders - making complex concepts accessible and actionable.
• Act as an internal expert and advocate for responsible, high‐quality AI engineering - setting standards and raising the technical bar across teams working in this space.

Engineering Practice

• Identify and drive opportunities to apply AI and automation to engineering workflows - including code quality, deployment, monitoring, and incident response.
• Establish AI‐friendly data and system design patterns that enable ongoing automation and reduce manual intervention across the platform.

Knowledge, Skills & Experience

• 8+ years in software engineering with a strong foundation in backend or platform development.
• Proven track record designing and evolving complex, multi‐tenant SaaS platforms at scale.
• Deep expertise in AWS cloud architecture across multiple regions; Azure experience will also be considered.
• Strong knowledge of real‐time communications systems, telephony, and telecoms infrastructure.
• Experience integrating with Salesforce or equivalent CRM platforms at an architectural level.
• Demonstrated ability to lead, mentor, and raise engineering standards across multiple teams.
• Ability to balance short‐term delivery requirements with long‐term platform sustainability.
• Track record of improving architectural governance - reducing technical debt and institutional knowledge risk.

Highly Desirable

• Experience architecting or evolving AI‐enabled products or platforms.
• Familiarity with establishing principal engineer or architecture governance functions.
• Experience working within product‐led engineering organisations responsible for building and operating SaaS platforms globally.