Principal Architect
- Hiring from
- United Kingdom
- Work type
- Remote
- Posted
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Reporting to the Chief Product & Technology Officer, the Principal Architect owns the technical architecture of the 15below platform: its shape today, where it is heading, and how it keeps evolving as our business, our customers and technology change.
Measurements of success in this role:
Measurements of success in this role:
- Clear and evolving architectural vision that aligns with business strategy, product direction and long-term growth, with engineering teams working towards a shared technical direction.
- Progressively simpler, more scalable and maintainable technology estate, reducing technical debt, duplication and operational complexity as the platform evolves towards a unified SaaS architecture.
- A secure, reliable and high-performing platform architecture that supports customer growth, multi-tenancy, data isolation and changing operational requirements.
- Consistent adoption of reusable architectural patterns that enable new products, integrations, acquisitions and emerging technologies to be introduced without accumulating unnecessary complexity.
- Engineering teams empowered to make sound architectural decisions independently, supported by clear principles, lightweight documentation and hands-on technical leadership.
- An architecture that enables continuous innovation, including AI capabilities, allowing teams to deliver new customer value quickly, safely and cost-effectively.
- An experienced architect with a proven track record of designing, building and evolving multi-tenant SaaS platforms, with strong systems thinking and the ability to make pragmatic architectural trade-offs that balance scalability, security, resilience and maintainability.
- A hands-on technical leader who is comfortable working with code, challenging designs, building prototypes and working alongside engineering teams to solve complex problems, while enabling others to make sound technical decisions independently.
- Experience in travel or aviation technology, particularly airline reservation systems, airport operations, passenger communications or industry integration standards.
- Strong technical experience across modern cloud platforms and mixed technology stacks, particularly Azure, .NET, SQL Server, Node.js, TypeScript and MongoDB.
- Experience designing high-volume, event-driven and API-led architectures, particularly messaging platforms operating across SMS, email, push notifications, WhatsApp and conversational channels.
- Practical experience using AI-assisted engineering, agentic coding workflows or automated approaches to accelerate legacy modernisation and software development.
- Experience designing globally distributed SaaS platforms, including regional deployments, data residency requirements and security frameworks such as ISO 27001.
- Experience working in PE-backed or high-growth technology businesses, particularly environments involving acquisitions, platform consolidation and rapid organisational change.
- Experienced in technical due diligence, platform convergence and post-acquisition integration, with a clear understanding of how to modernise complex technology estates and reduce architectural debt without introducing unnecessary complexity.
- Proven experience designing and delivering AI-powered capabilities in production, with a practical understanding of model selection, data security, evaluation and the performance, reliability and cost considerations of operating AI at scale.
- An excellent communicator and collaborative leader who can influence stakeholders without formal authority, draw on the expertise of others and balance long-term architectural direction with commercial realities and immediate customer needs.
- Owning the long-term architecture of our platform, setting its technical direction, managing architectural debt and ensuring it remains scalable, maintainable and coherent as the business grows and adopts emerging technologies.
- Leading the convergence of our existing platforms into a unified, multi-tenant SaaS solution, defining the tenancy model, data isolation and migration approach, and proving key architectural patterns before scaling across the estate.
- Defining reusable integration patterns and reference architectures that enable acquired businesses, new products and capabilities to be integrated efficiently without introducing unnecessary complexity.
- Shaping our AI architecture and adoption strategy, making foundational decisions around data, tenant isolation and inference, while enabling teams to deliver AI capabilities that create measurable customer value safely and cost-effectively.
- Defining and governing the platform's non-functional requirements, including security, scalability, resilience, availability, performance and cost efficiency, ensuring the architecture meets the operational needs of our customers as the business grows.
- Providing hands-on technical leadership, validating key decisions through code and prototypes, and establishing clear architectural principles, C4 models and lightweight decision records that empower engineering teams to make consistent technical decisions.
- Working closely with Engineering, Product, Commercial and our existing platform experts to build shared understanding, influence technical decisions and ensure future architecture reflects the realities of our current platform.
- Partnering with Commercial and Implementation teams to review customer change requests, ensuring solutions align with architectural standards and product direction, and identifying pragmatic, scalable alternatives where needed.
