Principal Architect

Step into a client's hardest technical decisions, work out what they actually need, and design something that still holds up in five years. Then stay close enough to the code to make sure it does.

Level Principal

Focus System design, Cloud, Distributed systems, Threat modelling, Secure by design

Location United Kingdom, remote

Hours Full-time, permanent

Posted 4 September 2026

The role

You'll lead architecture on our client engagements. Some start from a blankpage; more start with a system that's struggling under its own weight. Eitherway, you'll be the person the client's leadership and engineers both trust tomake the call, explain it and see it through delivery.

What you'll do

• Get to know each client's business, constraints and systems as they reallyare, not as the diagram says.
• Design new builds and modernisations: service boundaries, data,integration, security, and how it all fails.
• Assess existing systems and give clients a clear, honest view of the risksand what to fix first.
• Stay hands-on: review the code that implements your design, and catch driftearly.
• Set technical direction for our teams on each engagement, and mentor theengineers growing into architecture.

What we're looking for

• You've designed systems that are still running in production, and you cansay what you'd do differently.
• You can take a CTO and an engineer through the same trade-off, and say nowhen no is the right answer.
• Deep experience with cloud platforms and distributed systems, and withsecuring them.
• You still read code in at least one of the languages we work in.

Working at BYTELAB

Our people are empowered to say plainly what they find, to each other and to our clients. As part of our consulting function you'll have the opportunity to pursue a range of challenging and ambitious problems with creative solutions, ultimately leaving every client able to carry on without us.