Principal Architect – AI

Leonardo UK Ltd

Greater London

On-site

GBP 150,000 - 210,000

Full time

12 days ago

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Benefits offered by this job

Annual leave 25 days

Holiday purchase 5 days

Private medical insurance

Health cashback plan

Pension

Life cover

Season ticket loan

Salary exchange (ride2work)

Gym membership

Employee referral scheme

Job summary

Becrypt seeks a Principal Architect – AI to define and govern AI across the business. This is a hands-on, individual contributor role working with engineering, product, IT and operations to design secure, scalable AI platforms.

You will build and govern AI gateways, agentic workflows and related infrastructure, while shaping policy, risk and compliance to enable safe adoption of AI technologies in regulated environments. This is a senior role requiring deep technical credibility.

Qualifications

Senior level architect with practical AI platform experience.
Experience designing secure, scalable AI-powered systems.
Proven ability to influence across engineering, product and IT.

Responsibilities

Lead the design and governance of AI across Becrypt's platforms.
Build AI gateways and agentic workflows with secure boundaries.
Collaborate with engineering to assess risk, security and operability.

Skills

AI architecture

Security by design

Cloud platforms

System integration

Stakeholder influence

Senior IC

Tools

Docker

Python

FastAPI

TypeScript

AWS Bedrock

OpenAI APIs

Job description

Job Requirements

About the Role

Becrypt is creating a new, standalone Principal Architect – AI role to lead the

organisation's approach to artificial intelligence across the business. This is a senior

technical position for someone who can look across engineering, product, IT and

operations to identify where AI can genuinely improve how Becrypt builds, secures and

runs its platforms — and who can then design, build and govern the systems that make

that possible.

This is not a team-management role. It is a hands-on, principal-level individual

contributor position for someone who leads through technical depth, credibility and

influence — working closely with engineering teams, technical architects and internal IT,

and setting the policies, risk frameworks and compliance guardrails needed to adopt AI

responsibly.

What You'll Do

Strategic & cross-business

Assess processes and systems across the business — engineering, product, customer-facing operations, internal IT — to identify where AI can add genuine value, streamline work, or reduce risk.

Platform & engineering delivery

Design and build platforms for long-running agentic workflow systems, including AI gateways and supporting infrastructure services.
Design Docker-based services using Linux container environments, Python, FastAPI, TypeScript, MCP/FastMCP, OpenAI and AWS Bedrock.
Apply secure boundaries around credentials, service access, tool invocation and human-in-the-loop operation for AI/agentic systems.
Build reusable services and integrations, and assess the security, isolation, maintainability and operational implications of emerging AI technologies before they're adopted.
Actively probe AI systems, integrations and agentic workflows for vulnerabilities — thinking like an attacker to uncover weaknesses in credential handling, tool invocation and data exposure before they're exploited, and feeding findings back into design and policy.
Get hands-on with difficult technical problems alongside engineers — investigating, diagnosing and making architectural calls that improve security, assurance, maintainability and long-term product direction.

What You'll Bring

Experience in designing, building, securing and operating complex software platforms, Linux-based systems, distributed services, APIs and integrations.
Strong, current hands-on experience with Docker/containerised environments, Python, FastAPI, TypeScript, and AI-specific tooling such as MCP/FastMCP, OpenAI APIs and AWS Bedrock.
Practical experience building or integrating AI gateways, agentic workflow systems, or similar AI infrastructure — not just using AI tools, but architecting the systems around them.
A track record of enterprise or platform architecture at principal/CTO-advisory level, ideally spanning regulated, security-conscious, or infrastructure-heavy environments (e.g. payments, cloud platforms, integration platforms).
Demonstrated ability to design policy-based authorisation, credential/access boundaries, and secure-by-design controls for systems handling sensitive operations.
Experience operating as a senior individual contributor — influencing engineering, product, security, customer-facing and leadership stakeholders without relying on formal team management.
A working mental model that balances security (CIA), usability, customer needs, engineering effort, operational risk and product strategy when making architectural decisions.
Comfortable writing and championing policy, risk and compliance documentation, not just technical designs.

Nice to Have

Experience in a security-focused or highly regulated product company (Becrypt's own domain).
Prior experience introducing AI/agentic capability into an existing engineering organisation from scratch.
Familiarity with data-centre/on-prem as well as cloud (AWS) deployment models.

Success in This Role Looks Like

A clear, prioritised view of where AI can and should be applied across Becrypt, backed by policy and risk frameworks that leadership and engineering trust.
A working AI gateway / agentic platform in production use, built to Becrypt's security and operational standards.
Engineering teams and internal IT with a clear, well-governed path to adopt AI capability safely and consistently.

Package & Discretionary Benefits: