Chief Technology Officer / Chief Architect

Own the architecture of a Sovereign Intelligence Operating System (SIOS) that regulated organisations run offline, on hardware they control.

About Mickai:
MICKAI® is a Sovereign Intelligence Operating System (SIOS), AI that regulated organisations own and run behind their own firewalls, offline, on hardware they control. This is not a slide or a prototype. The product is built and live: an operational system running 50 specialised brains, 25 domain and 25 operational, with more than 60 studios that replace the enterprise cloud stack category by category, from SAP and Salesforce to Splunk and ServiceNow. Every consequential action is sealed into the Open Audit Record, a post-quantum signed ledger under FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65, verifiable offline for years. A self-validating harness passes over a thousand checks on the operator's own machine. The IP estate stands at 104 filed UK patent applications and 2,340 claims. Three live commercial surfaces already sit around the SIOS, with early clients lined up. This is not an average pre-seed company.

The role:
You own the technical strategy, the system architecture and the R&D behind MICKAI, the SIOS. This is a hands-on architect role, not a management seat. You lead the engineering team and keep the build honest against the patent estate: multi-brain consensus, data provenance, offline attestation and the post-quantum signed audit ledger. The product is already live, so the work now is making it harder to break, easier to deploy on operator-owned hardware and ready to defend to defence, finance and government buyers barred from the public cloud.

What you will own:

• The end-to-end architecture of the SIOS across its 50 brains, 25 domain and 25 operational.
• Alignment with the patent families: multi-brain consensus, data provenance, offline attestation and the post-quantum signed audit ledger.
• The cryptographic audit ledger, hardened so every consequential action stays verifiable offline for years.
• Leading, reviewing and mentoring the engineering team while staying deep in the code yourself.
• On-device, fully offline AI running on operator-owned hardware, with no dependency on external inference.
• The standard for secure enclaves, key management and post-quantum signing across the stack.
• The deep engineering of a live product, from the local runtime and gateway to the sealed audit record, plus the technical narrative that carries regulated security reviews.

What you bring:

• 10+ years in AI/ML, distributed systems or security, with real architecture ownership.
• A hands-on builder who still reads and writes the hard parts of the code.
• Deep experience with on-device or offline AI and constrained, air-gapped environments.
• Strong command of cryptographic systems, key management and secure enclaves.
• A track record designing systems where correctness and auditability are engineering properties, not policy claims.
• The ability to lead a small, fast, technical team and set the architectural bar, with comfort defending design decisions to regulated buyers.

Nice to have:

• Post-quantum cryptography, signed ledgers or verifiable-compute experience.
• Prior work in defence, financial services or government security environments.
• Experience shipping AI on operator-owned or edge hardware at scale.
• Named inventor or co-inventor on patents in AI, security or distributed systems.

The deal (please read):
This is a founding, part-time role. You take meaningful sweat equity now, which converts to a competitive salary once we close our seed round. It is remote only and open only to applicants based in the United Kingdom or the United Arab Emirates, for legal and compliance reasons, with UK-friendly overlap appreciated.

Why join now:
The product is built and live, the patent estate is filed, and the category is still being defined. You would shape the architecture of sovereign AI from the ground floor.

Required with your application:
Please include a link to your LinkedIn profile. Applications without a LinkedIn profile URL will not be reviewed.

How to apply:
Apply here, or email the team at [email protected] with a short note and anything that shows your work. Tell us what you would build in your first month. We move fast and we reply. Mickai builds its team on merit and mission, and welcomes applicants from every background.