Principal Architect — AI-Native Security Platform

About the Position

Principal Architect - AI-Native Security Platform

• Remote
• Spain, Andalucía, Spain
• Poland, Mazowieckie, Poland
• Andorra, Canillo, Andorra
• Brussels, Brussels, Belgium
• Bosnia and Herzegovina, Federacija Bosne i Hercegovine, Bosnia and Herzegovina
• Albania, Berat, Albania
• Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria
• Zagreb, Zagrebačka županija, Croatia
• Nicosia, Lefkosia, Cyprus
• Praha, Praha, Hlavní město, Czechia
• Tallinn, Harjumaa, Estonia
• Germany, Berlin, Germany
• Budapest, Budapest, Hungary
• Valletta, Valletta, Malta
• Chișinău, Chișinău, Moldova, Republic of
• Montenegro, Andrijevica, Montenegro
• North Macedonia, Veles, North Macedonia
• Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal
• Romania, București, Romania
• Bratislava, Bratislavský kraj, Slovakia
• Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
• +20 more

The Role

You will own architectural coherence and technical direction across CipherScale’s AI-native platform. A major near-term responsibility is defining and evolving the boundary between AI reasoning, the MCP capability layer, the CipherScale Controller, and customer infrastructure.

This is not a traditional enterprise architecture position. We are looking for a builder who can move between emerging standards, security architecture, product strategy, prototypes, code, and production engineering.

Our philosophy is that we are a small, close-knit team, and we care deeply about you:

• Competitive pay rates
• Fully remote work environments
• Self-managed time off

Important:

• This will be a permanent employment opportunity for candidates based in Spain. For other locations, it will be a B2B contract.

Responsibilities

AI-Native Platform Architecture

• Define how AI agents securely discover, reason about, and invoke CipherScale capabilities.
• Establish strict separation between probabilistic AI reasoning and deterministic security-sensitive execution.
• Design for CipherScale AI Admin, external AI clients, enterprise integrations, and future machine-to-machine interactions.

MCP Architecture

• Own strategy for MCP Tools, Resources, Apps/UI, long-running Tasks, human-in-the-loop interactions, discovery, authentication, authorization, schema design, and extensions.
• Continuously track relevant MCP specifications, SEPs, SDKs, security guidance, and ecosystem changes.
• Translate important changes into architecture decisions before implementation choices make adoption expensive.

Security Architecture

• Zero Trust and least privilege
• Human, workload, and agent identity
• OAuth/OIDC, RBAC/ABAC/ReBAC
• Credential isolation, ephemeral authorization, secrets and key management
• Prompt injection, confused-deputy attacks, tool poisoning, data exfiltration, and privilege escalation
• Auditability, policy enforcement, and non-repudiation

Core principle: the model may reason, recommend, and request actions, but it must never become the authorization authority.

Distributed Systems & Cloud Architecture

• Control-plane and data-plane separation
• SaaS and self-hosted enterprise architectures
• Multi-tenancy, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, and GCP
• Asynchronous workflows and event-driven systems
• Gateways, proxies, service identity, high availability, and failure recovery
• Observability and OpenTelemetry

Requirements

Required Strengths

• Distributed systems and cloud architecture
• Security architecture and Zero Trust
• Identity and authorization
• API and protocol design
• Agentic AI systems and MCP or comparable agent/tool protocols
• SaaS / multi-tenant architecture
• Kubernetes and cloud-native systems
• Networking, event-driven systems, observability, and key management
• Strong software engineering skills and ability to prototype

What Matters Most

• Learning velocity - reads specifications, follows emerging standards, prototypes quickly, and recognizes architectural shifts early.
• Systems thinking - naturally reasons about trust boundaries, failure modes, data flows, state, scaling, and operability.
• Security mindset - asks how a system can fail or be abused, not only how it works.
• Product judgment - understands how architecture affects speed, trust, customer value, and differentiation.

What We Don’t Want

• Governance-heavy enterprise architecture without implementation responsibility
• Architecture-by-PowerPoint or process-first TOGAF bureaucracy
• Pure prompt engineering without distributed-systems and security depth
• Treating AI as simply another REST client
• Technology recommendations without hands-on validation

We Offer

• Competitive salary and comprehensive benefits
• A senior ownership role with responsibility for a critical engineering surface
• The autonomy to define platform strategy, standards, and technical direction
• The opportunity to build foundational systems with immediate, measurable impact
• A fast-moving, AI-native engineering environment
• Direct collaboration with technical leadership and product engineers
• Support to experiment, automate, and introduce better ways of working
• A culture that values speed, ownership, sound judgment, and reliable delivery

About the Company

CipherScale is building an AI-native Zero Trust security platform for a world where enterprise infrastructure is increasingly operated by humans and autonomous agents through natural language, agent protocols, and machine-to-machine capabilities.

• AI agents and agentic systems
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)
• Zero Trust, identity, and authorization
• Networking and distributed systems
• Cloud infrastructure and enterprise security

Role summary: A hands-on principal architect who will own architectural coherence across CipherScale’s AI-native security platform, with particular responsibility for agentic systems, MCP, Zero Trust, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and security boundaries.