AI-Native Architecture Lead: Pods, Security & Scale

Socium; Manchester; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

Socium is building AI delivery pods where engineers and AI workers build, test, ship and run real product. The senior technical lead will own the architecture and set standards for how AI systems are built, evaluated, secured and scaled.

You’ll be the most senior technical person across the pods, owning how agents, models, tooling, data flows and security boundaries work in practice. You’ll be deciding which models to use, how agents should be orchestrated, when to build or buy, how output

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building AI, LLM or agentic systems in production.
• Strong understanding of RAG, agent orchestration, prompts frameworks.
• Experience owning architecture decisions across security, observability and cost.
• Comfortable making technical decisions in fast-moving environments.
• Able to create standards and structure without slowing delivery.
• Strong software engineering background, ideally with .NET/C#, close to production code.

Responsibilities

• Owning the AI-native technical architecture across the pods
• Defining patterns for agents, orchestration, model selection and tooling
• Setting standards around code quality, prompt engineering, testing and evaluation
• Making technical decisions on build vs buy, re-architecture and tooling choices
• Working directly with AI workers and improving the quality of their output
• Mentoring AI Engineers and Graduates
• Working with security and compliance around data, tooling and governance
• Managing tooling subscriptions, usage costs and API spend
• Helping prove how the pod model scales beyond the first teams

Skills

Hands-on AI

Architectural ownership

Agent orchestration

Prompt engineering

C# / .NET

Security & governance

Job description

Socium is building AI delivery pods where engineers and AI workers build, test, ship and run real product. The senior technical lead will own the architecture and set standards for how AI systems are built, evaluated, secured and scaled.

You’ll be the most senior technical person across the pods, owning how agents, models, tooling, data flows and security boundaries work in practice. You’ll be deciding which models to use, how agents should be orchestrated, when to build or buy, how output