About BullWall
Bullwall is one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies in Europe, protecting hundreds of thousands of IT users across hundreds of customers. We are 40 people today and expect to scale to around double that within 24 months, with engineering growing materially as the business compounds.
We are hiring a Principal Architect to build the architectural and engineering spine that carries the company through that growth, keeps the product coherent as the team expands, and leaves Bullwall well-positioned for the next chapter.
You report to the CTO and operate as the technical peer, alongside the Head of Product Architecture on the product side and the engineering managers who lead our two delivery teams.
Why this is worth your time
- Bullwall is committed to being at the forefront of agentic engineering. That commitment shows up in tooling, process, and investment. You will be the one deciding what it looks like in practice.
- You join at the point with commercial traction and the technical spine is still yours to shape. The product works, the customers are there, and the architectural decisions that will determine how cleanly the next 24 months unfold are still open.
- You will work on what we believe is the most important unsolved problem in cybersecurity architecture: A deterministic control plane at the data layer, operating alongside the probabilistic detection stacks the market has spent a decade building.
- You own architectural direction across the engineering organisation. You set the standards, write the artefacts that scale beyond your own reach, and decide how AI-assisted engineering takes shape in practice at a company this size. Day-to-day team delivery sits with the engineering managers, and you and they operate as partners, each responsible for a different axis of how the organisation performs.
- You have a hands-on CTO as a partner and a strong product architect as a peer. The technical leadership bench is deliberately built so you are never the only senior voice in the room.
- The engineering team is ready for this role. They have explicitly asked for stronger architectural leadership, they want to learn, and they will meet you halfway. You will join an ambitious and eager team.
- You will do visible work. The architecture you set will be cited in customer conversations, partner stacks, and diligence rooms, and you will be expected to represent it.
The company stage
Bullwall is a 40-person company growing fast, with a product that the market is buying and a trajectory toward material expansion of engineering over the next 24 months. The company is small enough that the Principal Architect works hands-on, close to the code, and close to the team, and big enough that the decisions you make now will compound across every hire and the product decisions that follow. Your job will be to decide what must be formalised now and what can wait, to create leverage through written standards, and to hold architectural coherence under commercial pressure.
The team you will work with
The engineering organisation is ready for this role. The team is technically strong, collaborative, and eager for the kind of architectural leadership this seat brings. The role is new and has been created with backing from the CEO, CTO, and Head of Product Architecture.
You work in close partnership with the Head of Product Architecture to shape architecture across Bullwall. He works closest to customers, product direction, prototyping, and domain design. You work closest to the engineering system: technical feasibility, platform architecture, core patterns, and the standards that govern how the product is built and run. Customer patterns he surfaces become the primitives you build, and the technical capabilities you build open new product directions he shapes.
The engineering managers leading the two delivery teams are partners to this role. They own execution and people leadership. You own architectural direction and standards. That interface runs close, direct, and written down. The engineers want someone who will coach them, challenge them, and raise the bar through direct, substantive leadership.
What you will deliver in the first 18 months
- Establish the target hybrid platform architecture and a pragmatic modernisation roadmap, covering both the on-prem core and the emerging SaaS control plane.
- Define the core service boundaries, API contracts, and data model standards that will carry the product through the next two years of growth.
- Put in place architecture decision and review mechanisms that scale with hiring, so that architectural quality does not depend on any single reviewer.
- Reduce key-person dependency across the engineering organisation by converting tacit architectural knowledge into written, operational standards that travel with new hires.
- Implement pragmatic AI-assisted engineering guardrails and evaluation practices, calibrated to a small team where leverage matters more than breadth.
- Raise the external technical credibility of the company in customer conversations, partner conversations, and diligence settings.
Ongoing responsibilities
- Set and maintain architectural direction across the product portfolio, keeping the on-prem core and the SaaS control plane evolving as one coherent platform.
- Partner directly with the engineering managers of both delivery teams, aligning architectural direction with their execution plans and resolving cross-team technical trade-offs as they surface.
- Partner with the Head of Product Architecture to translate product direction into engineering designs that are ambitious on capability and conservative on complexity.
- Coach and mentor engineers across both teams, raising the architectural bar of the whole organisation through written artefacts, pair sessions, and code review.
- Run technical due diligence on tools, frameworks, and platforms, with a bias toward fewer moving parts.
- Direct fast proofs-of-concept for new cloud, data, and AI technologies before the organisation commits serious capacity.
- Represent Bullwall in technical conversations with customers, partners, and in diligence contexts.
Who we are looking for
- 12+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years at Principal, Staff, or Chief Architect level, or equivalent CTO-level seniority in a product company.
- A senior technical architect with deep experience in growing product companies. You have seen what happens when a company scales from small to mid-sized, and you know where the inflection points are.
- Hands-on track record of making pragmatic platform decisions under commercial pressure, including choosing what to formalise now and what to leave loose.
- Working fluency with AI coding agents in production engineering and a considered view of where agentic engineering is heading, without treating AI as the answer to every question.
- Experience coaching strong engineers through technical and cultural change, building capability rather than dependency.
- Exposure to technical diligence, whether on the buyer side, the seller side, or as the internal technical lead answering diligence questions.
- Cybersecurity product exposure is a plus; sharp intellectual curiosity about the domain is essential.
- Strong written and verbal English for technical, executive, customer, and partner audiences.
