Lead Architect / Founding Engineer

London (Hybrid, 1- 3 days onsite)
£110,000 – £130,000 + benefits
12-month FTC (strong likelihood of perm)

Omnis Partners is working with a PE-backed, data-led technology platform undergoing a critical phase of product and platform evolution. Backed by strong commercial traction and significant investment, the business is bringing engineering in-house for the first time and is hiring a Lead Architect / Founding Engineering Hire to own that journey.

This is a rare opportunity to step into a foundational technical role with real autonomy, influence and long-term progression into senior engineering leadership.

The Opportunity

As the first in-house engineering hire, you’ll take end-to-end ownership of an in-flight, cloud-based data platform that underpins the company’s core commercial product.

Partnering closely with the CTO, you’ll stabilise and rationalise the existing architecture, define the future technical direction, and lay the foundations for scale as the business grows and builds an internal engineering function.

This role blends hands-on architecture, technical decision-making and strategic leadership, with clear scope to evolve into a broader engineering leadership position.

What You’ll Be Doing

Architecture & Platform Ownership

• Take ownership of an existing data platform, addressing technical debt and structural risk
• Define and document a 6–12 month target architecture aligned to growth and commercial priorities
• Own platform scalability, reliability, performance and maintainability

Technical Strategy

• Lead critical build vs buy decisions
• Define data models, integration patterns and core technology choices
• Own security posture in collaboration with IT and cyber partners
• Act as the ultimate technical decision-maker, balancing speed, cost and long-term impact

Cloud, Data & DevOps

• Own cloud environments, account structure and cost strategy
• Lead CI/CD, deployment standards and release processes
• Establish engineering best practice across infrastructure and data pipelines

Leadership & Collaboration

• Act as the CTO’s primary technical partner
• Help shape future hiring plans, role definitions and team structure
• Play a key role in building the internal engineering capability over time

Current Tech Environment

You’ll take ownership of and evolve a modern cloud and data stack including:

• AWS (Lambda, S3, Glue, RDS, IAM, VPC)
• Snowflake (core data platform)
• Terraform (Infrastructure as Code)
• GitLab (CI/CD)
• AWS native monitoring and secrets tooling

What We’re Looking For

Essential

• Experience as a Lead Architect, Principal Engineer or Senior Engineering Lead
• Strong hands-on background in cloud-native, data-heavy platforms
• Proven experience stabilising and evolving existing systems
• Deep understanding of cloud cost, scalability and operational trade-offs
• Comfortable operating as an early or founding engineering hire

Desirable

• Experience in PE-backed, scale-up or transformation environments
• Exposure to data-driven product platforms
• Previous involvement in building engineering teams from the ground up

Why This Role?

• True founding engineering impact
• High visibility and direct influence on product and platform direction
• Clear path into senior engineering leadership
• Backed by investment, ambition and real commercial momentum