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.