Senior Principal Architect, CTO Office

About IFS and the CTO Office

IFS builds enterprise software for asset-intensive and service industries: ERP, Enterprise Asset Management, and Field Service Management. The CTO Office is an independent unit within Product & Customer with a dual mandate: track what is genuinely happening at the frontier of the industry, and convert it into technology strategy and working software inside IFS. It operates close to the executive team, frontier AI labs, and strategic partners, and it moves faster than a normal product organisation is allowed to.

• inference workloads 

• Data foundations: pipelines and lakehouse patterns (Microsoft Fabric/OneLake, Databricks, or equivalents), streaming and event-driven integration where the problem demands it 

• Enterprise integration: API design and consumption at scale, including REST, OData, GraphQL, and webhook/event patterns into ERP-class systems 

What sets candidates apart 

• Classical ML depth alongside GenAI: forecasting, anomaly detection, predicThe role 

• This is a hands-on architect role that grows into a player-coach role. You will start as the senior technical individual contributor in the CTO Office and then hire and lead a small team of engineers built in your image. 

• The unit takes on whatever matters most at the time. One month that is a production-grade agentic system with a frontier model provider, the next it is an architecture review of a platform under consideration, an internal AI tool the whole company adopts, or a technical escalation from a strategic customer. There is no standing backlog to hide behind. You go in, learn the domain fast, deliver something real in weeks, and hand it over or harden it. 

• We are explicit about the calibre we are hiring for. The team exists to produce output that would normally take a squad a quarter, in a fraction of the time, at production quality. If that sounds exhausting rather than energising, this is the wrong role. 

What you will do 

• Own architecture and delivery on the CTO Office's highest-priority technical projects, end to end 

• Write and review code daily; the role never becomes slideware 

• Design and ship agentic and LLM-based systems to production standard: retrieval at scale, evals, guardrails, security and identity, monitoring and auditability 

• Drop into unfamiliar codebases, stacks, and business domains and become dangerous within days 

• Hire, coach, and set the technical bar for a small team of applied AI engineers 

• Brief executives and senior customer stakeholders on what you built and what it means commercially