Principal Architect — AI-Native Security Platform

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.

What You Will Own

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

About CipherScale

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.

Requirements

What We’re Looking For

You likely have deep experience building complex distributed platforms, security products, cloud infrastructure, networking systems, developer platforms, or similarly demanding systems. More important than years of experience is evidence that you have personally designed systems that survived real-world scale, security threats, organ