Why Airbox? You're more likely to love your work when that work has a purpose, when it's meaningful and when it's protecting lives. And, at Airbox Systems, it will. Here's why.

We are driven by passion and great people who share our enthusiasm for trying to make the world a better place, our friendly team includes individuals with backgrounds in military, aviation, and law enforcement. Our experience brings first-hand insight into frontline operations in the air and on the ground to enable cutting-edge concepts for improving the service that we deliver.

At Airbox, our values can be described as behavioral guidance. They are the principles and beliefs that provide a cohesive vision and define who we are as a business. In doing so, they define our organisation internally, and externally with our stakeholders and customers. In essence, they are our “true north” that help us to navigate our organisation through prosperous times as well as uncertain periods. Our company beliefs and values are embodied in our culture. Whilst we celebrate the diversity of the people we work with, there are certain values and attributes all of us share – whatever your background, these are the qualities we are looking for in the people we hire: Commitment, Positive Realism, Ethics, Accountability, Humanity, Quality, and Delight.

What this role is about:

As the Principal Architect, you will be the lead technical authority responsible for the structural integrity and future-readiness of Airbox systems. Reporting to the CPTO, you will lead the evolution of an established platform into a modern, highly available, API-first, and globally scalable solution that empowers responders worldwide. This is a role for a disciplined practitioner: 80% of your time is dedicated to technical execution—creating blueprints, reviewing complex PRs, and providing the guardrails that allow our engineering team to perform the most impactful work of their careers.

What you’ll do:

• Strategic Platform Evolution: Lead the incremental decoupling of our platform using modern patterns (like the Strangler Pattern) to support our hyper-growth goal of scaling from £15m to £50m in revenue.

• Architectural Leadership: Act as the primary designer of our cloud and software ecosystems, managing the migration to .NET 10 and transitioning databases from MSSQL to Postgres.

• Identity & Security: Own the strategy for Identity and Access Management (IAM) using Keycloak, ensuring we maintain the highest security standards for public safety and defense.

• Technical Governance & Mentorship: Lead a small, high-impact architecture function, focusing on technical mentorship rather than admin management to build a culture of excellence.

• Cloud & Mobile Strategy: Optimize AWS services (SQS/Kafka) for regional scaling and provide the technical blueprint for our mobile stack’s evolution toward Native environments.

• Stakeholder Alignment: Act as the primary technical partner to the Head of Engineering and CPTO, translating visionary product goals into stable, scalable technical designs.

About You:

• Expert Systems Architect: You have a proven track record of designing high-availability, mission-critical systems and modernizing legacy codebases in a scale-up environment.

• Master of .NET & Data: Deep expertise in the journey to .NET 10 and extensive experience optimizing both Postgres and MS SQL Server.

• Cloud Native & Distributed Systems: Highly proficient in AWS infrastructure and asynchronous messaging patterns (Kafka/SQS) to ensure system resilience.

• Identity Specialist: Hands-on experience implementing sophisticated authentication solutions via Keycloak in a complex B2B or government context.

• Pragmatic Leader: You balance technical perfection with commercial reality, capable of influencing without authority and communicating effectively from engineers to the CEO.

• Clearance: Ability to pass NPPV3 clearance (Must have resided in the UK for the last 3 years).

What we offer:

We’re always looking for new ways to celebrate our people. You’ll be no different.

• The Mission: The chance to work with a passionate team working toward a shared, ambitious goal that saves lives.

• Flexible & Hybrid Working: Work where you’re most productive. We have two mandatory Townhall days (Spring and Autumn), but otherwise, you have the freedom to shape work around your life.

• Health & Wealth: Private medical cover with Bupa, and a pension scheme with up to 6% matching.

• Rest & Travel: 26 days holiday (plus public holidays), up to 20 "Nomad Working Days" per year, and an Electric Car Scheme.

• The Office Experience: If you visit, you’ll find walking pads, table tennis, and collaborative spaces named after our values (like the ‘Quality’ room).

Connect with us: Interested in the role, or Airbox in general, but don’t meet 100% of the requirements? We’d love to hear from you anyway! We’re excited to see if your unique skillset could be a match for our future.