Enterprise Architect in London

Smarsh empowers its customers to manage risk and unleash intelligence in their digital communications. Our growing community of over 6,500 organisations in regulated industries counts on Smarsh every day to help them spot compliance, legal or reputational risks in 80+ communication channels before those risks become regulatory fines or headlines. Relentless innovation has fueled our journey to consistent leadership recognition from analysts like Gartner and Forrester, and our sustained, aggressive growth has landed Smarsh in the annual Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing American companies since 2008.

The Enterprise Architect is a senior technical leadership role accountable for the architectural direction, integrity, and long-term evolution of Smarsh’s Conduct platform — a strategic growth engine for the company. This role owns the system-level architecture across services, data, integrations, and platform capabilities, ensuring the platform can scale globally while meeting the rigor of highly regulated environments. This is not a feature-level architecture role. It requires enterprise-level systems thinking, the ability to make consequential architectural decisions, and the judgment to balance near-term delivery with multi-year platform evolution.

How will you contribute?

• Own the Architectural Direction of Conduct: Establish and enforce a coherent architectural strategy across the platform. Make and defend high-impact design decisions that shape the system for years to come.
• Drive Structural Evolution: Identify and lead architectural changes required to support scale, performance, extensibility, and new capability domains.
• Ensure Platform Coherence Across Teams: Define and uphold architectural standards, patterns, and boundaries across multiple engineering teams and services.
• Design for Regulatory-Grade Scale: Architect systems that are resilient, auditable, secure, and capable of operating at enterprise data volumes and global customer scale.
• Influence Technical Direction Across the Organization: Align Engineering, Product, and customer-facing leadership around architectural trade-offs and long-term platform investments.
• Anticipate Downstream Impact: Evaluate how architectural decisions affect performance, cost, operability, compliance posture, and future development velocity.

What will you bring?

• Enterprise-Level Architectural Ownership: Demonstrated experience defining architecture across business-critical platforms, not just at the service or feature level.
• Deep Systems Expertise: Strong command of distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and data-intensive platforms.
• Architectural Judgment Under Constraint: Ability to make durable architectural decisions in environments shaped by regulatory requirements, legacy constraints, and delivery timelines.
• Transformation Leadership: Experience guiding modernization, re-architecture, or structural evolution across multiple teams.
• Technical Authority & Influence: Establishes credibility through depth and clarity of thinking; drives alignment without relying on direct reporting lines.
• Platform Mindset: Consistently optimises for long-term platform health rather than short-term feature delivery.

Typical Experience Profile:

• 10+ years in senior technical roles, including significant experience as a Principal, Staff, or Lead Architect.
• Proven ownership of architectural direction for large-scale, multi-service platforms serving enterprise customers.
• Experience designing and evolving distributed, event-driven, or data-intensive systems operating at scale.
• Background in regulated or compliance-sensitive environments where auditability and risk management materially influence system design.
• Demonstrated success leading cross-team architectural initiatives or platform transformations.
• Strong hands-on credibility; able to engage deeply in design, modelling, trade-off analysis, and architectural review.
• Experience collaborating across global engineering teams and influencing senior technical stakeholders.

AI Usage & Enablement:

The Conduct Architect will ensure the platform is designed to effectively leverage AI capabilities where they create meaningful value, while aligning with governance and guardrails defined by centralized AI and risk teams.

• AI Responsibilities: Architect platform patterns that enable the safe and scalable integration of AI services into Conduct workflows. Design clean system boundaries and data flows that support the incorporation of external or internally provided AI capabilities. Ensure AI-enabled components meet performance, reliability, and observability standards within the broader platform. Improve developer experience by establishing reusable patterns, tooling, and integration standards for AI service consumption. Partner with centralized AI, data, and governance teams to implement established guardrails within the Conduct architecture.

AI Competencies:

• Practical experience integrating AI/ML or LLM-based services into distributed systems.
• Understanding of the operational implications of incorporating probabilistic services into deterministic workflows.
• Familiarity with service abstraction, API design, and integration patterns that allow AI capabilities to evolve without destabilising core platform architecture.
• Ability to evaluate AI service adoption pragmatically from a scalability, cost, and reliability perspective.

$200,000 – $230,000 a year. The above salary range represents Smarsh's good faith and reasonable estimate of the range of possible base compensation at the time of posting. Any applicable bonus programs will be discussed during the recruiting process. The salary for this role will be set based on a variety of factors, including but not limited to, internal equity, experience, education, location, specialty and training. Local cost-of-living assessments are done for each new hire at the time of offer.

About Our Culture: Smarsh hires lifelong learners with a passion for innovating with purpose, humility and humour. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do. We work closely with the most popular communications platforms and the world’s leading cloud infrastructure platforms. We use the latest in AI/ML technology to help our customers break new ground at scale. We are a global organisation that values diversity, and we believe that providing opportunities for everyone to be their authentic self is key to our success. Smarsh leadership, culture, and commitment to developing our people have all garnered Comparably.com Best Places to Work Awards. Come join us and find out what the best work of your career looks like.