Principal Architect

Job requirements

• A sustained record of leading and developing senior technical professionals, including people managers or Team Leads.

• Deep expertise and established credibility in q/kdb+, with the ability to apply that foundation to KDB-X and the wider KX product stack.

• Strong experience designing and governing complex, data-intensive systems, including architecture, performance, resilience, deployment, integration, security and operability.

• A sustained record of working directly with clients in a professional-services environment and building trusted relationships with senior technical and business stakeholders.

• Experience leading complex customer engagements through solution definition, delivery, adoption and resolution of critical issues.

• The judgement and communication skills to advise customer executives, challenge constructively and translate technical decisions into business implications.

• Experience shaping complex scopes, estimates, technical propositions and Statements of Work.

• A strong record of turning delivery experience into reusable architectures, technical standards and improved ways of working.

• Practical understanding of AI-assisted engineering and agentic systems, including the controls required for responsible customer deployment.

• Experience leading across organisational boundaries and influencing product, engineering, commercial and customer-facing stakeholders.

• Experience with KDB-X or other current KX products; existing KDB-X mastery is beneficial but not a prerequisite.

• Experience with cloud architecture, distributed systems, DevOps, CI/CD and container is deployments.

• Experience working with high-performance time-series, vector real-time analytics solutions.

• Knowledge of financial services, aerospace and defence, life sciences, telecommunications, manufacturing or other data-intensive industries.

Job responsibilities

• Lead, coach and develop the KX Services technical delivery function, including architects, developers and DevOps.

• Set the function's technical direction, engineering standards, reference architectures and reusable delivery patterns.

• Advise customer executives and senior technical stakeholders on architecture, transformation roadmaps and the business implications of technical decisions.

• Partner with Customer Success, account teams and Delivery Managers throughout the customer lifecycle to maintain technical alignment, remove adoption barriers and support intended customer outcomes.